Kelandon

8 hours ago, Minion said:

MacOS, Windows and iOS, two out three which do not support right-clicking.

That's not entirely accurate. Macs have had a functional right click for about two decades now. The default mouse has only one button, so you have to use a control-click to access it, but if you use a laptop or a third-party mouse, it's easily accessible.

Moved out of General to the (I think) correct forum.

10 hours ago, Minion said:

PS: Speaking of pronounciation, "Vogel" is actually pronounced "Fogel". Just thought I'd add this bit of trivia for anyone who isn't familiar with the Germanic languages.

True in German, but I don't think Jeff pronounces it that way in English. Hard to tell from this video, but I think I've heard him say it before.

And let's not get started with how many people mispronounce "Geneforge."

It's been suggested before. Jeff has never shown any interest. From a recent interview:

Quote

Multiplayer is something we’ve been asked for again and again, but writing a multiplayer game is very difficult. It requires a lot of technical skill and it’s just, it’s not really something we’re interested in.

 

We’re a storytelling company. We just telling a single-player story like a novel with lots of fighting, that people can just sort of sit in their room alone and sink into.

Whew! I had been putting in a couple hours here or there for so long that I'd forgotten what it was like to devote a whole day to this! It's sort of exhilarating, so rather than wait to do a monthly update, I'm posting now.

I did a bunch of work on Chapter 4. I created the first couple of towns and put in floors/terrains for the first one. I planned out the shops and added the items to the shop numbers. I created a whole bunch of little outdoor specials. And I planned out the core quest line for Chapter 4 and started to implement the first core quest (out of, basically, three).

I think Chapter 4 is going to be easier to create than Chapter 3, which is part of why I'm skipping ahead. Chapter 4 is structured much more like Exodus — it's a journey from one end of an outdoor area to another. Once I get to the end of Chapter 4, I think I can go back and try to fill in those last little bits of Chapters 1 and 2, test that part thoroughly, and fill in the bulk of Chapter 3.

I had always thought of the Lava Ocean in Exodus as being at least half foreshadowing Homeland, rather than actually playing out within the scenario. But now I'm realizing how much that's true of other parts of Exodus, too. The Thkhi? There was (intentionally) no meaningful explanation of that. But oh man, in Homeland....

2 hours ago, Deities and Demagogues said:

Huh.  Asimov wrote serials?

Yes — a lot of his earlier books were serials — but that's not what I meant. For his later books, the publisher basically went to him and said, "We want you to write another Foundation book. It needs to be [x] words. We'll pay you a bajillion dollars. Will you do it?"

And yes, that's a little different from a serial where you're paid for every 32-page installment, but it's the same basic incentive: you have to hit a word count.

15 hours ago, Deities and Demagogues said:

What may be notable about Dickens' situation is that the amount he had to write was agreed upon in advance.  He might not have been chasing a carrot by extending his prose, but he was certainly chasing an inflexible target.

This was also true of, for example, Asimov (at least in later years).

Progress is still happening, slowly. Man, that scene that I mentioned a month ago took it out of me.

After I finished that scene, I couldn't write much for a little while, but now I've moved to the beginning of Chapter 4. Chapter 3 is definitely still highly incomplete, and one lengthy combat sequence at the end of Chapter 2 is still unfinished (as well as a long sidequest in Chapter 1 and another in Chapter 2), but I feel like I just need to get out what's in my head at this point. I know stuff about Chapter 4, so I need to put it into the scenario. Then, once that's out of my head, I can go back and fill in as need be. This is not as straightforward as it sounds — I have a stronger sense of how the second half of Chapter 4 will go than I do about the first half of Chapter 4. I still have to figure out how to put together the elements that I know have to be present to lead to the end of Chapter 4. As always, I'm starting with town design and plot/quest outlines, and then I'll start adding in dialogue and specials. Combat, as always, will come last.

I was not sure that I'd ever get to Chapter 4, so this is kind of trippy. It's also trippy for another reason — uh, suffice it to say that the cave floors are unusual in Chapter 4. Also in Chapter 3, but more so in Chapter 4. Not like the fluorescent cave floors in the Strange Cave in Exodus, although like a different part of Exodus. A part that, if I remember correctly — and often I don't, with this sort of thing, but even so — no one has ever asked me about, even though it's definitely a bit unexplained.

I'm still projecting that this won't be done until next year at the earliest. I'm finding time to work on it, but not nearly enough to make as much progress as I'd like.

4 hours ago, Randomizer said:

Ask Mazumdar in the east side and eventually he will tell you after completing a plaque quest.

Man, who knew he cared so much about dental hygiene?

Given that one of the other active topics in General right now is about recommendations for RPGs that are similar to Spidweb games, you're fine mentioning the names of other games here.

I skipped ahead and am now about to write the scene with the biggest twist in the whole scenario. Now that I've designed the sequence leading up to it, which runs across two separate towns and has taken me several hours in itself, I'm at the point where the scene begins. And, somehow, I'm nervous.

I think the general issue was that it's much, much harder to make a BoA scenario with the editor tools that existed at the time of the 2004 release than it was to make a BoE scenario with the editor tools as of BoE's release.

Also, there came to be more general tools for making games over time — BoE was more novel in the late '90s/early 00's than BoA was in the mid '00s/late '00s, much less now. At this point, if I were learning a new game-making system, there are a ton of engines that I could learn that are much more powerful than anything that Spiderweb would release.

2 hours ago, Dorgath said:

I didn't mean the Spiderweb games are like Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale; I was just using them as an example of a totally separate game series but although both are rooted in D&D, the type of party is one of the main differences of the game.

I didn't interpret you to mean that, either. I thought that you meant that the difference between Avernum/Geneforge/Avadon is like the difference between Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale — which it's not. BG and IWD (at least IWD 1) have a lot more in common with each other than the Spidweb series have in common with each other. (I think Slarty's description of "huge" overlap is overstated, but, eh, differences in opinion I guess.)

It's very much not like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale — those both use Dungeons and Dragons rules, take place in the Forgotten Realms setting, etc. Avernum, Avadon, and Geneforge have similar graphics and user interfaces (including similar dialogue systems) but are otherwise almost entirely different. They have different rules/game mechanics (other than generally having turn-based combat), different settings and characters, etc.

I went through and labeled the rest of the scenarios. It's possible I missed a scenario here or there, but they should generally be labeled now.

5 hours ago, Chessrook44 said:

Yeah, originally.  But I was referring to when I thought I looked at him later on during my frantic searching.

The option to sell to him was never "hidden." It was always there. You just forgot about it.

7 hours ago, Chessrook44 said:

However I believe I had checked the inkeeper and he didn't actually have a "I have stuff to sell you" option at the start, which lost me.  I must have been hidden or something.

This is not what happened. In Episode 379, at about 27:50, you sold things to the innkeeper when you first talked to him. You just forgot about that later.

4 hours ago, Thralni said:

Ishad: I'm guessing that's the BoA manual, not the Editor manual?

That's correct. Spell descriptions are in the BoA Manual.

There is no call to check the difficulty level that the player has set. One could create difficulty levels with a flag — I've considered doing that in the Bahssikava rewrite (basically, insert an "Easy" mode that would tone down nearly all the combat) — but it wouldn't track the hardcoded difficulty levels.

It had not occurred to me to create difficulty levels in Homeland, though. I'm sort of inclined against it because it would be a mess to try to balance.

Just FYI for everyone, I went back and labeled the first episode for most of the scenarios. I made through about 80% of the posts (to Threnody), but once we started getting into a lot of little short scenarios, I got tired of it and stopped for the time being. I may go back and label the rest at some point.

This is driving me nuts, but I can't find the post now where the main workaround was revealed. It was before Al posted that in August 2003, although, if I remember correctly, not long before. There was another workaround earlier, too.

It's not documented, but Magery also adds to Willpower at a 1:1 ratio. The actual formula is Willpower = Int/2 + Mag/2 + Pri/2 + Magery.

By the time you hit level 35, I'd expect your primary spellcasters to have raised their primary skill (Mage Spells, Priest Spells) to 17 to access all the available spells and to have raised Int to at least 10 or so. From 17/2 (which BoA rounds down to 8) and 10/2, that'd be a sum of 13. You definitely have access to Magery at that point, and there's a pretty good chance that the party has added some to it — it's cheaper than both Int and Mage Spells/Priest Spells, just for adding spellcasting power. My standard level 35 party has a Magery of 8, which totals a Willpower of 21.

A dual-classed spellcaster (i.e., a character that loads up on both Mage Spells and Priest Spells) could have Int of 8, Mag of 17, and Pri of 17 at level 35, which totals a Willpower of 20.

So I'd say a reasonably high Willpower at level 35 is about 20 or 21.

If I remember correctly, AtG was released before the 100-town bug workaround was discovered.

7 minutes ago, Ess-Eschas said:

given the 100-town bug

I'm kind of terrified that there's something like this in BoA, too — whether it's exactly the same 100-town bug or just some other damned thing that applies only to huge scenarios — and no one has encountered it yet because no one has made a scenario this large. I guess we'll find out.

Still filling in parts of Chapters 1-3. I'd say Chapter 1 is about 90% done. I kind of have no idea what to do with the last 10% — there are elements that I know I want to be present, but I just don't know what to do with them right now. So it may be a while before that part is 100% done. Chapter 2 is a lot more incomplete — I want to take an entire day (maybe tomorrow) to fill in a lot of combat, which will bring it a lot closer. I now have a high-level conceptual picture of what should happen in every part of Chapter 3 (including the second part, which was a bit of a blank before), but there's a lot of detail work involved in implementing it.

To give an example of one of the things that makes this all take forever: Chapter 2 has a huge city that turns out to have too much dialogue for one town. So I spent a chunk of today creating a new town for the insides of several buildings. This requires copying over the interiors, copying over the dialogue, changing the dialogue node and state numbers, creating special rectangles that move from one town to the next, editing the creature numbers in special states... etc. If I had known from the beginning that I was going to need to do this, I could've saved some time, but I didn't.

I'm at 56 towns now, many fairly incomplete. Exodus had 57 accessible towns, so it's getting close to Exodus's size. But there are at least 11 towns remaining in Chapters 2 and 3, and probably 15-20 in each of Chapter 4 and Chapter 5. So I'm starting to think that this thing will be above 100 towns when it's done.