Niemand

Quote: Is there a way to quickly get the right sort of artifacts for one's party level? The HLPM will sell rare standard items which appear in the four SW scenarios, I think. There's also the Artifacts Hall scenario which had roughly this purpose (although I never got around to trying it out), but it may be fairly out of date now.

Quote: And as an aside, do you guys really think hiding your emails with "(at)" is going to trip up even the simplest algorithms? Heck, I don't even know if "name at subdomain dot com" would evade detection. Empirically, this seems to have some utility. While it seems like it would be pretty trivial to write an email address scavenger that would be smart enough to handle patterns like this, it appears that there's enough low-hanging fruit that the spammers mostly don't bother. Other than that, minor obfuscation of email addresses is just a habit for a lot of us here.

For my research on the node limit, see this post. Short answer: it's 32000. Quote: Is there any other way to get a numeric response other than having a check_text_response_match call for every possible value? There is no other supported way. I assume you recall the discussion which resulted in this suggestion, which is what I would recommend using in general. This is another thing that can be done very nicely via tricks, but given that a not totally horrible legal way exists, it might be best to stick to that. At some point I'll publish a finished version of the tricky version, though. (So many irons in the fire. SO MANY.)

The mistake is actually on line 24 (I think, I just counted quickly): there needs to be a semicolon after "set_flag(0,1,250)".

Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel Originally Posted By: Metatron (Does anyone know what happens when two towns load the same town script?) Presumably it works without comment It should work, on entering a town I think that the game will just load the script from the indicated file in total ignorance of whether it has been loaded before. Also, it only ever has one town in memory at a time, so there's no possible way to have a conflict. Nice example, by the way, Metatron.

Quote: i just tried loading my avernum 3 party into boa and it says the save isnt a valid avernum save. I remember being able to play boa with avernum parties back when i last played through these games, am i doing something wrong or am i misremembering? I think that you are misremembering; it has never been possible to do this.

Yeah, set_flag() is what I meant: set_sdf() doesn't exist (for no clear reason, despite the presence of get_sdf()). Use get_flag() and set_flag() to preserve sanity.

I'm not sure how much you've looked at scripting so far, but the call you want is set_sdf(), which takes three parameters: the two coordinates of the flag and the value you want to set. If you haven't already, you will need to create a town script for the town; see section 2.10 in the editor documentation for more details, and set it as the town's assigned script in the town details dialogue in the editor. You'll then need to create a new state in the town script and write in it the appropriate call to set_sdf(). Finally, you'll need to place a special encounter rectangle in the editor and set its called state to be the new state you wrote in the town script. EDIT: Shazam! Topic moved.

Quote: On an unrelated note, does anyone know if there is a maximum on the number of animations (explosions, etc) running simultaneously? I think I might have run into such a limit. There is such a limit; as I recall Ephesos hit it with some of his animations in early versions of SoG, but I don't know what exactly it was. if you determine it please make note so we don't forget again. Quote: You could iterate "short char_has_item_of_class_equip(short char_num,short which_class,short take_item)" for all the cursed items in the game if you give all such items the same special class. It depends if you only to check for one specific type of cursed item or if you want to check for any type at all. You can do this, but I'm not impressed with this as a solution in general, since it both requires a bunch of redundant work tagging all of the relevant items in the scenario's data definitions, each item can carry only one tag (potentially causing problems if you wanted to be able to query more than one property this way), and it can't work on items that the party carries into the scenario. That being said, in some situations this will be good enough, and is supported, which may make it the pragmatic choice. Finally, regarding the sneaky dark magic I mentioned above: It seems I don't have quite the right incantations handy; the ones I have do something different than what I thought. A bit more research will be required, although the fundamental idea should still be sound.

Quote: Will the sneaky way work in the condition of a dialog node, though? It's not going to be a one-liner, so no. You could fake it fairly well by evaluating it from a special rectangle that the party has to (or at least is likely to) walk through before starting the conversation and storing the result, though. (After all, the party isn't going to be taking off a cursed item between walking through the rectangle and talking to the NPC.) Quote: And can be done without restore_pc()? I think yes, using more sneakiness, but why? Is there something wrong with using restore_pc()? If you're concerned about preserving the character's hitpoints and energy, you can just store them before and then revise them to match again afterwards. Quote: Next question... how to remove dread curse? alter_stat doesn't seem to work, possibly because dread curse reduces all stats by 1 including itself. I can detect it with get_stat_levels_bought (which is actually kind of strange, but whatever), but I can't seem to remove it. Huh, I hadn't thought there was a problem with this. Nephilim Mystery gives the party 12 levels (!) of Dread Curse and then removes them again, successfully as far as I recall. Maybe someone else has some experience with this.

Quote: a) determine if a PC has a cursed item equipped In Jeff's infinite wisdom: No! Quote: remove said curse using a script Yes, according to the docs restore_pc() does this. Edit: Just realized that it should be possible to implement a sneaky work-around to accomplish (a). I think that I have all of the necessary information, so I'll just have to code it up and test it.

Originally Posted By: Tirien Forgot to mention, you can hit invisible monsters with magic, just has to be a aoe spell like. . . the priest spell that made all the blades Cloud of Blades. This was probably my favorite spell in A2; it was tricky to use, since each target would be surrounded by a 5 by 5 area that was as deadly to my characters as the enemies, but very powerful, and its uniqueness made it fun. It's also an important spell in BoA due to the way that fields inflict level based damage, so that at very high level where the game's balance starts to break down badly, Cloud of Blades is the only spell that can still inflict appreciable damage. (While other BoA designers have gone so far as to prohibit its use, I did sort of the opposite and taught the NPCs to cast it, though only in my personal copies of a few scenarios to date. That made for some tough fights indeed.)

I believe that we have 5 finished entries in total, of which at least mine was technically after the deadline, although by ~6 hours.

Nah, I don't have it either. I don't have a whole lot of free time these days, and I already have several games I enjoy. I may get it in a few years.

For the dialogue images, have you looked through TGM's dialogue picture package on the Blades Forge? There's a lot of stuff in there and you may find something that suits.

I can test, on either platform. (I'm too burned out to work on patching up my own entry for the moment, I guess I'll do this same process in a week or so. In the meantime, I might as well help someone else.) Niemand (niemandcwATgmailDOTcom) OS: Mac OS 10.6.4, simulated Windows 98, or real Windows 2000

I'm so rusty at writing cutscenes that I had some troubles with something similar sounding. You may want to get advice from someone more knowledgable (or examine a script written by such a person), but the fix I used was to mostly move the party around using march_party(). It takes some extra effort, since you have to march them to the place where you want the final member to end up and then sequentially through the spaces for the other members up to the first member, but it gets the job done.

Yeah, the game won't, as I recall, let the party leave town properly is there is too little space between the edge of the town boundary rectangle and the physical edge of the town. You may just have to contract the boundary rectangle by one or two spaces on that side to make it work.

Blah. My entry is submitted. It is probably super buggy because much of the testing was done by me while in a questionably conscious state. Also it has somehow gotten to be 7 a.m. I am going to be so alert at work today.

The only spells in the original Avernum trilogy where I thought that was a real hindrance were Bind Foe and Arcane Summon (before A3 for the latter). What I find most unfortunate about the transition from Exile to Avernum was the loss of space based (rather than creature based) targeting, and somewhat as a result the loss of field generating spells. The creature based targeting is really great most of the time for casting spells quickly but accurately, but it accomplishes this with a corresponding loss of flexibility, which showed up in some frustrating cases like the way that invisible creatures became immune to magic, for the simple reason that spells couldn't be launched at them.

I somehow thought I had already done this: Click to reveal.. Frank Pulver: Level 5 Demolitions Specialist STATISTICS: Strength - 3 Dexterity - 2 Coordination - 4 Intelligence - 2 Endurance - 4 SKILLS: Weapon (Needlegun) - 4 (+1) Weapon (Atom Blaster) - 4 Artifice - 2 Survival - 3 Armor - 3 Perception - 3 Knowledge (Explosives) - 3 (3 skill points saved) ATTRIBUTES: Health - 12/30 Dodge - 8% Stamina - 9 Speed - 4 Feat: Power Armor It seems that I forgot to recalculate Pulver's HP last time, not that it made any difference. Since he was injured at the end of last session, I increased his HP proportionally (9/22 -> 12/30); I'm not sure if this is correct, though. Also, with regard to this: Originally Posted By: Dantius Oops. Power Armor and Assassin were my placeholder titles I never changed. My bad. You don't actually need the powered armor, all it does is give a bonus to what level of armor you can wear. It doesn't matter to me what the feat's name is, so no problem there. I also understand that no specific armor is necessary; my comment about my choice possibly not being very useful was because this feat doesn't do anything until Pulver manages to acquire some significantly better armor, which he will then be allowed to wear, which isn't something I can control at all.

You mean his porting towns and outdoors from the trilogy games right? Ishad Nha can answer better when you notices this topic, but I'm not sure if he has made public any of his results yet. There is, however, the Avernum 2 template by Clint Peters in case you want a location in (most of) Avernum.

Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel Am I the only one here who reads around 50 regularly updating comics? No, I also read quite an number of them. I have a primary list of about 15 whose addresses I usually type manually and then a secondary list, which I find has now grown to over a hundred items, of others which I check on the days on which they are supposed to update, or on which I estimate they may update. The long list needs a bit of pruning; there are several in it which have died or finished in the last couple of months, and several I've lost interest in reading. A shortened list of my favorites (most of which have already been mentioned here) would be something like: Girl Genius, Gunnerkrigg Court, Schlock Mercenary, The Mansion of E, Lackadaisy, and Freefall. I'm quite fond of Dresden Codak, but it barely functions like a comic at all. I feel a need to give special mention to MS Paint Adventures. While the first story (Jail Break) and the abortive second (Bard Quest) were terrible, Problem Sleuth was stupendous, and Homestuck has far exceeded my expectations. I find fascinating the way that Homestuck in particular has embraced its medium, making use of actual URL shortener links, which point back to resource held on the site. Sadly, I think, some of the in jokes arising from the interplay between the comic, its subsidiary comic (supposedly the work of one of the characters), and the fan created wiki for the subsidiary comic will become less clear and harder to trace out after the fact.

Since we lack an official pronouncement, I'm going to assert that the deadline will be the end of Sunday, PST. Given that this should approximately double our set of finished entries, it seems reasonable to me. If anyone with more authority disagrees, they should say so. Quote: f I am lucky, my scenario will be done early tomorrow, giving me and my testers less than a day to polish. Which, I guess, is workable, but so it goes, no? With that short a period of time, I wouldn't bother trying to conduct a traditional beta test. Communicating back and forth just takes time, and there comes a point when the amount of rushing required just isn't worthwhile. If you can find other people who can and want to test on very short notice, by all means go ahead, but otherwise your time may be better spent not agonizing about it.

The file named in asian characters is left over from when I was writing the file saving routines for Graphic Adjuster; at one point I made a mistake with converting character encodings and that filename was the result. I assume that it is pure gibberish, but it amused me and so I've kept it. I too would like to know the correct name of the unknown file. I think that it's a BoE savefile that was corrupted during my investigations into cross-platform file handling in OBoE, but since I accidentally overwrote its name at one point, I can't tell anymore what exactly it was for or what I was doing with it.