Niemand

It could just mean that the game is bogging down horribly trying to run the script. From the description, though, it's hard to tell.

So I can't redraw the entire town using set_terrain() and set_floor() calls? (Actually, I tried that for the just completed contest, and it turns out to be close to impossible if one needs to change the floor, terrain, and height of each space. It might, however, become practical if the necessary changes are more sparse, and it could be very interesting optimization problem to try to generate the script which would most efficiently effect those changes.) At any rate, I think that you could simply have the judges enforce that the town is essentially the given starting town without overly drastic modifications. I think it wouldn't be too hard to understand and stick to the spirit of such a rule.

No, definitely not.

The effect of sanctuary (as I recall, for PCs) is that the character cannot be targeted for attack by enemies, unless he attacks someone else, in which case the sanctuary is lost. Invulnerability isn't quite the same thing, since attacks will be able to target the creature, but they still won't inflict any harm.

Quote: Now, if only I could figure out why Sanctuary randomly breaks. I may just have to give the monster an equal amount of invulnerability to fill in the cracks. Yeah, that's a weird one. If, however, all you want is for the creature to not be harmed (you don't need the completeness of it being able to break its own sanctuary by itself attacking) invulnerability should be just about equivalent. Even if you do need it to be able to 'break' its protection, you could script it so that it removes its own invulnerability before attacking.

The advantage is that upgrading Quicktime has an impact on every other program which uses Quicktime as the engine for media playback: iTunes, the Finder, Quicklook, and so on. In a desperate effort to get back on topic, I found Celtic Mistrel's TextWrangler files: He put them there.

I think that the solution is to not put it in a loop. Remember that you already have an implicit loop because the game will call the script as long as there are AP left. If the call gives back a 1, then have the creature just do something (or nothing) else instead.

If you're referring to what I think you are, I luckily have a record of Kel's example. From the reference material I've slowly been writing: "run_dialog also returns the number of the choice made by the player, with some complication: The number returned will be 1, 2, or 3, being one plus the index of the selected choice. However a known issue is that the code: Code: reset_dialog(); add_dialog_str(0,"1, 2, or 3?",0); add_dialog_choice(0,"1"); add_dialog_choice(2,"3"); print_num(run_dialog(1)); //code example by Kelandon will actually print '2' if the player selects the choice whose label is "3". This can be a tricky pitfall, so if your dialog setup process if using logic to decide which choices to display, test carefully that the return values from run_dialog are what you think they are in all cases."

No. VLC sucks. (Quicktime 'X' also sucks. The only righteous path is to keep using Quicktime 7. Forever.)

You want the 3D editor from my utilities page, it's the only one that isn't frightfully old. You'll want Graphic Adjuster for managing graphics, unless you feel like seeking out and figuring out some other, more general purpose, resource editor. I don't endorse Dialogue Editor, but you can use it if you want. For a text editor, you might want to try the beta version of AScript; it's slow and buggy but specifically tailored for Avernumscript (including having Alint built in). Otherwise, go get TextWrangler, which you ought to have anyway. Around here somewhere there's a set of avernumscript highlighting definition files for it. (You can just use TextEdit for your text editor, in its plain text, mode, but you probably want something a little fancier.) EDIT: It's really beyond the scope of this forum, but since I already had a list handy from a few months ago: my general list of basic software recommendations. Because I need to seize every possible opportunity to impress my opinions on the rest of the world.

Originally Posted By: Lillith this is in fact a thing that steam allows people to do. recettear did it. Then it sounds like Steam could be quite a good fit for Spiderweb's purposes. Originally Posted By: Erasmus The badges are the drivers here; put a game up for free and maybe people who have time will play it, put a game up for free with badges and every single grinder will play it due to the "ooh shiny" effect. The way I interpreted the idea is that you want to suck in large numbers of casual game players who otherwise wouldn't seek the game out. These are likely, in my estimation, to be people who don't care at all about badges or achievements or whatever. (I play flash games now and then on sites like kongregate, and I initially didn't even grasp what you meant by 'badges'. I don't have an account on any such site, I just go to them to play games.) And, as Lilith points out, if badges/achievements really are a big driver, Jeff can put them in.

The thing is that Spiderweb already does roughly half of what you're suggesting, by making the demos for its games unusually large. This has basically the same effect as the short prequel idea you describe. What's missing is a way to get very large numbers of people to try the demos. You're probably correct that putting them on game websites like the ones you mention would do this, but there are serious practicality issues. The most obvious is that Spiderweb's games are written in C family languages, so porting to Flash would be a gigantic amount of work. Another is that while small compared to most native PC games these days, the games to take substantial amounts of disk space and memory compared to what a browser based game can be reasonable expected to: Avernum 6 occupies over 110 MB after installation on my machine. You could cut this down somewhat in a shortened game, but it would probably be really tough to gain an order of magnitude improvement, which would probably still be pushing it. EDIT: It seems to me that if Jeff can make things work with Steam (that is, if Valve will let him) so that there is a free demo and an easy mechanism to pay to upgrade it to the full game it would be roughly equivalent to your suggestion. Every single Steam user would be exposed to the demo, and I'm not sure how much free stuff there is on Steam, but free is a good way to get people to pay attention long enough to download and start playing.

Quote: First, is there any way to retrieve a game I bought on a different computer? My old one's broke, and with it my copy of BOA Yes, as long as you can still get files off of the old computer's hard-drive, you can move the file which stores your game's registration information to the new computer. On Windows I think that the relevant file is BladesofAvernumData.dat in the Data folder under the Blades of Avernum folder. If that isn't possible (due to the old computer being too thoroughly broken) or doesn't work, email Spiderweb: give them the information from when you registered the game the first time (who you are, so they can find you in their records) and registration code for the game on the new computer, and ask them for a new registration code. They are usually happy to provide one in situations like this, as I understand. Quote: Second, BOA isn't running any scripts on my laptop and won't respond to the mouse. It's windows 7 with the Atom N4 processor. No skipping past the tutorial, no going through the runes of no passing (cloak or no cloak) I unfortunately have no particular expertise with Windows machines, so hopefully someone else has an idea for what to do about this.

One issue is that if approach_char() returns 1, you remove all of the creature's AP, but keep running the loop. (Keep in mind that the game will call the creature's script repeatedly as long as the creature still has AP, but if the creature runs out of AP while the script is running, the script still runs to completion.)

The return value indicates what the creature is actually going to do, after having received the instruction. You may need to cancel whatever the creature was already doing (using stop_moving()) in order to make it do anything useful.

Quote: How do I get a creature to move closer to the party during combat? I'd say that approach_char(), with 1000 as the target argument would be the thing to try. Quote: In a custom creature script, I removed all of the do_attack() calls in order to keep the monster from occasionally charging my party instead of doing what it's supposed to do. Unfortunately, now it refuses to move during combat in order to keep my party in sight. What's worse is that it will use its abilities even when no one is in sight. I tried having his script revert him back to the START_STATE if he couldn't see his target, but apparently creature scripts employ selective hearing, just like my dog. If you're having trouble with behavior across states, maybe try simplifying the script by putting everything into just the START_STATE. It's often easier to reason about how the code will work when there are no state transitions involved.

Just sent it back to you.

Unless the contest organizer(s) are adamant about it, soon, and bit-by-bit. The versions submitted to the contest were many of them somewhat rushed (mine was, anyway) and the designers would like to polish them up so that players can enjoy them maximally (at least I would, anyway). I'm working on getting mine in order; I hope to conduct beta testing over the next week or two, and get it out directly after. Celtic Minstrel was doing beta testing for his, and had made a lot of progress, but things got quiet, so I'm not sure what he's waiting for, besides perhaps just a respite from classes to get the last work done.

Originally Posted By: Duck m I the only person who doesn't like the idea of working with someone else's ideas? Participation in the contest will not be mandatory. (Probably) Originally Posted By: Slartucker No. However, the rest of us don't like working with someone else's scenario editor, either. Well, feel free to make your own and use that!

I highly doubt that it will be Steam only. As I understand, Jeff has sold a number of his games through third party sites before in order to reach a wider audience, and that's all I expect is going on here.

Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel He has apparently mentioned eventual plans to do just that. Nothing has come of it yet. Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Sixth out of twenty-one isn't bad. Wait, it's out of twenty-one? I thought it was out of six. 21 people signed up, but only 7 completed products.

There's not a very good way to do this, as I recall; a number of us have tried to do what you describe, and I'm not sure if anyone has found a way to do it well. You may just be stuck with a long, annoying set of delays. One trick that might make it work is that a number of the things that the game does, like showing damage inflicted, involve running animations, which, as I recall, will also trigger queued up user animations. So, you could try setting all of the animations, not triggering them yourself, and then applying the damage.

As far as I know: yes, with the caveat that they only make sense in scripts being run while in a town. (I'm not sure what happens if you try to use them from an outdoor script, for example, but a creature should be perfectly able to organize itself and its fellows into groups.)

This sounds similar to a change I made to the Mac version, although as I recall my changes were to choose_text_res and get_str. We should probably take a look at each others' work so that the two versions are consistent.

One certainly could do that, although that would mean that additions would be mutually exclusive. If you planned to have a single, authoritative, third-party patch that might be acceptable to you.