Lattan

Not to mention you can save and reload.

Given that there's not a way to it in the Avernum Annotated Maps, I'm guessing it's unreachable. There are a couple of things like that in other games (a room in Erika's Tower (A3) you can't enter, etc.)

Shadow leather can be worn while casting mage spells. If your mage is a natural mage (as he should be) it sucks.

Actually, knowledge brews gave you five skill points in A2 also. I know because I got mad the first time I drank one in A3 (yesterday) right after playing A2. Bah.

The Alien Blade's pretty nice in A1. I think I used that throughout the whole game with my singleton...including when I killed Grah-hoth. That was kinda funny.

Definitely not normal. However, if you want to buy the Avernum games, you should just buy the Avernum trilogy. It's much cheaper, and you get registered versions on CD for just the shipping (which is like $2).

Are you sure you've gotten them that way? I think I remember them resetting every time you leave the tomb, so you have to change all the ones that need it in a single go.

I recently got A3 and started playing it, but whenever I climb into a boat it says something along the lines of 'system can't play sound' and gives me error number 2 -85 -204 (something like it, anyway...I can check later). I've checked, and the rowing sound is in the sound file for the game...the kicker is that I had a copy of the original demo (v 1.0) lying around, and there aren't any problems with that. The error only occurs with version 1.1.3 (or whatever the newest version on CD is).

 

Any advice?

It was really quiet right before the Windows release, too...perhaps all the "I can't find this in the docs" questions are over so people need less help.

Huh? Could you give that to us in longhand?

And the scripting processing is probably the slowest part of the operation because it involves a fair bit of data manipulation that is performed by the engine finding critical strings and numbers in ASCII text, which takes a while.

I've had similar problems occasionally in A2. I usually fixed it by picking up one stack and giving it back to my characters, at which point the game 'woke up' and merged them. Have you tried that?

Well, it's not that slow anyways. I've got a Mac 9600 (which is from '96) with a G3/400 upgrade card stuck in it and it runs fine for me.

And I don't have a clue what "you rather doubt."

Oh, we're smart. If people can drop a scenario in the right folder, they can replace a graphics file.

Not because it's badly programmed (or at least not completely that) but because it has to turn textual commands (avernumscript) into computer commands. And he's asking for help because it's slower on a faster (presumably, anyway, with a higher clock speed) system.

Couldn't you create new races by replacing character pics and using custom special stats or items to modify experience?

(I don't know if this is possible, but people dismissed the idea really quickly, which I've noticed tends to be a bad idea with scriptable engines like this...or anything else, really.)

Are you spywared or something?

If you read all the docs with the editor, you find the likelihood of Jeff doing any of this is approximately zero. However, he conveniently includes the source code so those who know C can do it themselves. Those of us who don't, on the other hand, are screwed.

(I assume he released the Windows code, too, though I actually don't know. But he definitely let out the Mac stuff.)

The other Avernum games are almost identical in engine to Avernum 3.

 

And since you apparently haven't picked this up yet, remaking the Avernum series as BoA scenarios is *illegal.*

And since the original scenarios are supposed to show what's possible with the engine, Jeff may have just been giving new designers possible topics for scenarios. You could set one when the school is closed explaining what happened, for instance.

Thanks, Vent, but I do know that much programming. I'd just assumed there were different behavior models for different NPCs, whether they were external scripts or internal functions.

 

Kelandon: Ah. Thanks. I've never looked at BoE, so I don't really know much about its engine. *wonders what nodes are.*

*Decides he doesn't care enough to look*

Like I said, I haven't played all the way through every one, but I think there might be a Nephilim fort in A2 where people call for help. Or maybe not. Hmmmmm.....
It just surprises me that having already created a scripting language for BoE, JV wouldn't make use of it in Avernum.

Yeah, but Geneforge was also very open about its contents...there was even a little note about it somewhere. Avernum, on the other hand was not. By your argument Avernum clearly had no graphics files because you couldn't open up anything and see pictures. (okay, so I think there are files with 'graphics' in the name, but you get the idea).
And I really don't know about different behaviors...it depends. Archers/mages have a tendency to hang back, and sometimes they run away...but then again, sometimes they don't. Whether there are 'external' scripts (ones not in the engine) or several internal ones, or just one big complex internal one, is something I really don't have the experience to decide (and frankly I don't think anyone does. There are too many possible variations on each to tell what's what.).

How do you know the Avernum games included no scripts? I mean, sure, there weren't any convenient text files lying around for users to edit, but I'd assume things like that would be shoved inside of some data file. And while I confess to not having played through the registered Avernums yet (just ordered the trilogy CD...yay!) there are certainly different kinds of fighting styles in the game. Though I suppose that it's possible those behaviors are actually coded in and each character is simply slapped with a behavior number.

What's the point when we've got a character editor?

So you think that every person in Avernum had their own subprogram for behavior and dialog nodes? That's really horrid design if it's true, and makes modifying the scenario incredibly difficult.

I'm pretty certain there was some kind of script language going on already.

That's true, publicly available functions are probably harder to do than those that aren't, since they get used in so many imaginative ways.

It may be true that functions not needed for A3 weren't in the engine, but are there really that many functions in the scripting language that weren't needed somewhere in the Avernum series? Maybe there are, but I doubt the number is very large.

 

But that's just my look at things.