Erik Westra

Hi Overwhelming, In about an hour, the limit time is over (in my country. A few more hours over there). Actually, I'm in New Zealand, so the competition closed over here yesterday I guess tomorrow would be ok to announce your scenario, Erik. Righto, thanks -- so long as ButteredToast is okay with it, I'll post a message to the main BoA forum tomorrow, then. And it would be nice if you could let me know, to announce (and host) it in my site too I see you've already done that -- thanks! Oh, and I think I still owe you a reply to a message you sent out to my old E-Mail address about the BoA Editor Cookbook. You're more than welcome to host a copy of the Cookbook there, and to include a link to it from your site -- just do whatever you think is best. Sorry -- I've changed to using gmail, and I haven't been checking my old E-Mail address all that often. Cheers, - Erik.

Just to clarify: Quote: I received an entry today from Erik Westra -- Death at Chapman's in the morning. The scenario is actually called "Death at Chapman's" -- there's no "in the morning" in the title. Question: should I wait until after the competition has closed and judging is complete before letting others have a go at my scenario, or should I announce it now? It makes no difference either way as far as the competition goes (since it closes today), but I don't want to announce it if that'd annoy the competition judge(s)... Thanks, - Erik. PS: I deliberately didn't ask for beta testers, as I didn't think that'd be allowable for a competition entry. Hopefully there aren't too many bugs in it!

Thanks, everyone, for the kind comments. And thanks to Eldiran for pointing out that mistake in the dialog node -- if you (or anyway else) notice anything else, please let me know and I'll fix it in the next version. Ideas for new recipes, etc, would also be most welcome. Thanks again, - Erik.

Hi guys, I've finally finished a major new edition of the BoA editor cookbook. Here's a summary of what's changed: 1. Added a table showing the default floor types and how they appear in the game. 2. Added a table showing all the standard items available in the BoA game. 3. Added a list of all creatures (NPCs and monsters) available in the BoA game. The creatures are grouped by level number, and a separate table lists the creatures graphically. Each creature is colour-coded according to whether it is friendly, neutral, or hostile. 4. Added a chapter on quickfire. 5. Added a section on using custom creature scripts to have something special happen when a creature is killed. 6. Added information about creating a custom backdrop for an outdoor encounter by creating a "fight town". 7. Wrote an extensive chapter on "hills and heights". I think this covers everything that people asked for -- if I've missed anything, please let me know. Unfortunately, the "neat links" page on the Spiderweb Software web site still has the wrong address for the cookbook -- as always, the cookbook can be obtained (in MS Word, PDF and online) from: http://dnet.com/erik/BoA Please let me know if you find any mistakes, or have any suggestions for new recipes to add to the cookbook, or anything else I can do to make it more useful for you scenario-designers.

Another quick question: I want to prevent the party from walking on an area within a town. According to the docs, any terrain with fl_blocked set to 1 should make the terrain impassable. According to the corescendata.txt file, both terrain types 23 (water) and 71 (pit) have their fl_blocked flag set to 1 -- so to my way of thinking I should be able to use these terrain types to prevent the party from walking on the areas of town I don't want them entering. Alas, I can't get this going. I've placed both water and pit terrain in this area of town, but the party can still enter it. So how are you supposed to prevent the party from being able to walk on an area of town? The only way I've been able to figure this out is to create a special encounter and use the block_party() call -- but surely this is overkill. Is this a bug in the game, perhaps? The docs clearly state that any terrain with fl_blocked set to 1 will be impassable, and characters won't be able to walk over it. Clues, anyone? Again, thanks in advance... PS: I'm partly asking this because I want to be able to include the answers in the next revision of the BoA editor cookbook...so rather than just kludge together a solution, I want to know how to do it "right".

A question for you guys... When you add items to a town and then try to test out that town by loading a saved game, the newly-added items don't appear. The only way I can get the new items to appear is to start the entire scenario over again, rather than use the "load saved game -> enter town" trick. I've tried using the character editor to reset the towns, but that still doesn't cause the newly-added items to show up. So how are you supposed to get newly-added items to appear in your towns when testing? Surely you don't have to restart the entire scenario again from scratch every time... Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

Hi Magpie, Sorry if this is too basic. That's not too basic at all! You're perfectly right: heights are not explained very well in the docs, which makes them confusing -- and a perfect candidate for a recipe in the cookbook. Thanks!

Gidday, Agent. Thanks -- that's exactly the type of thing I'm looking for: common tasks which I don't have a recipe for. I'll put that on my list -- and if you can think of anything else, please do let me know.

Hi Magpie, It sounds to me like you've just made a request for the cookbook! That's a great idea -- I'll add it to the cookbook when I get the chance. By the way, you *can* get a list of the standard items by looking in the "I1", etc, menus within the BoA editor. The number of each item is sitting beside the name. I agree, though, that this isn't the most obvious or easiest way to find the number for an item, so I'll add it to the cookbook as well.

Hi guys, I'm planning to start work on a new version of the BoA Editor Cookbook. If anyone has any suggestions for new "recipes" which they'd like to see added to the cookbook, please let me know. I'm sure I've missed lots of common tasks which people want to do with the BoA editor, so now is the time to put in your requests. I can't guarantee to put in everything that you ask for, but I'm very open to suggestions and ideas... Oh, I'm currently changing the URL used to access the cookbook. Instead of just having it available as a PDF file, I'm now making it available in PDF and MS Word format, as well as having it available online as an HTML page. Hopefully that'll keep everyone happy. The latest copy of the cookbook (in all three formats, and with the corrections people have pointed out so far) is now available at: http://dnet.com/erik/BoA This will be the "official" home of the BoA Editor Cookbook from now on. Cheers, - Erik.

First of all, to everyone for the kind words. Now in response to various people's comments: It's usually spelled 'dialogue'. Dialog boxes are boxes that pop up with options for you to choose. Good point. I'll fix that -- thanks! I can write some stuff if you want, probably about moving the party between towns, creating monsters, etc. Thanks, Drakefyre, that'd be great. The first task is to figure out what sorts of recipes people want, and then write them -- we don't need everything, just the most common sorts of things people want to know when creating scenarios. By the way, haven't I've already mentioned moving the party between towns in the section called "Entering and Leaving Towns"? Creating monsters, though, would be a great idea. What other topics would people like to see? A major error in the file that I noticed: "Create the dialog script, and place the following at the start of the file: begindialogscript; " It should be begintalkscript (unless I am very much mistaken). Oops! I'll fix that in the next version of the cookbook... I absolutely hate PDF whatever the contents...Learn HTML or something. It'll make it 75% more accessable. Actually, I do know HTML (as well as Latex and about half a dozen other markup languages). I chose PDF because, as others have pointed out, it's possible to print out the resulting file. The original document is actually written using MS Word (I decided to keep it simple so that other can edit the file if they want), and I then generate the PDF file from the word document. I'm more than happy to make the original ".doc" file available, if people want that, and of course you can export MS Word documents to HTML, so that's possible as well. My only problem is that I'm using my company's web site to host the cookbook, and they don't have much spare space as they're using a hosted web site. If anyone wants to host the cookbook, please let me know and I'll pass it on. I actually considered making the cookbook a "wiki" (a collaborative web site) so that lots of people can contribute, but figured it'd be easier for people to have a file to download and refer to when creating their scenarios. All suggestions, though, are most welcome. Happy Easter!

Hi guys, I've started working on a "cookbook" describing how to use the BoA editor to achieve the various things you typically want to put into a scenario. So far, I've covered things like traps, locked doors, shops, etc. There's nothing new as such -- just information gleaned from the BoA manual, the appendices, and a bit of fiddling about to see what works and what doesn't, all packaged up to be easier to find and read than the existing docs. I'm not saying it's perfect (I'm learning, so I've almost certainly made a few mistakes here and there), and it's definitely not complete, but hopefully some of you will find this concept useful, both in learning how to use the scenario editor, and to refer back to when creating your own scenarios. If you're interested, you can grab a copy of the cookbook here . Please note that this is definitely a work in progress -- if you have any suggestions for new recipes, or can see any glaring (or not-so-glaring) mistakes, please let me know! Cheers, - Erik.

While you're making changes to the editor...can I possibly put in a (hopefully) quick request? In all the places where you can type in a number (eg, the "set special encounter" dialog box, where you're prompted to enter the number of the special node to be called), the editor puts the current value (or zero) into the field, but the text in the field is not selected for you. This means that you have to use the mouse to select the text before you can replace it with the desired value, which slows things down a lot. Any chance you could have the dialog box building block automatically select the text of the field, so that the user can simply type in the new value, without than having to select the existing text first? Hopefully this would be a simple change to the underlying dialog box engine, rather than having to do it for each dialog box in turn... Cheers, - Erik.

Quote: There might be a better way, but I see change_outdoor_location(). The manual says that's for long distance, though; I haven't seen another one. Alas, I've already tried that. I'm not sure what change_outdoor_location() does exactly, but when I tried calling it from within a special encounter within a town the party didn't move at all. Thanks for the suggestion, though...

Maybe I'm just being blind, but I can't for the life of me find a script command to make the party leave the current town. The manual says that it can be done, but I can't figure it out. Any ideas? Thanks, - Erik.