Niemand

Quote: Also, I win the messy award Ahem. I think not, unless it is awarded solely based on number of items not grid aligned. Originally Posted By: The Mystic Originally Posted By: Niemand Not really very different from a year and a half ago. Yikes. I'm curious as to what some of those objects are, but I'm kind of afraid of the answers I'd get if I ask. Taken together they're sort of a cross section of everything I've worked on in past couple of years. And while most of it isn't really all that excitingly weird, even I couldn't tell you exactly what 'what is this file's correct name?' is.

Not really very different from a year and a half ago.

I assume the choice of PST was to correct for the fact that most designers are probably in the continental U.S. (I think this is roughly true for the current state of the contest, anyway), so the end of the day GMT falls well before the end of their local days. However, we've been using GMT before (not because it is less arbitrary, but because it is a standard arbitrary choice), so perhaps we should stick to that.

Yeah, I'm behind schedule as well. (I have my outdoors drawn, and the climactic dungeon, but I still have to create the two friendly towns, set up all of the fights, and (shudder) write dialogue.) I think I can finish before the deadline tomorrow, but there's sure not going to be time for full testing. Should we extend the deadline to include Sunday as well? Originally I'd intended that time to be used to get the judging going, but maybe that isn't as important or as useful as I had imagined, particularly as compared to getting the actual entries ready and turned in. As far behind as I am myself, I still don't think we should allow the deadline to move any more than that, though.

Well yeah, that's why I want it. Who wants basicnpc? By using my own creature script I'll be able to have a character who's even more useless in combat than he would otherwise be.

Are you initializing demons to 0 somewhere first? Are you sure state 23 is getting called at all?

Quote: Duplicating the creature would work if I hadn't reached the quota of creatures in a town. On the other hand, I can probably find a creature to delete to make way for it, so I guess I'll go with that one. This might make you actually want to use place_monster(), then, since it lets you used a summon slot rather than a preset monster slot. You have to be careful, however, that it really does get summoned, as large fights can quickly summon enough creatures to fill all 34 slots. Of course you can always check to see if there are any summon slots free, and if not, erase one of the summoned creatures, since they probably aren't very important.

The only reason I can imagine, besides it being a bug, is that Kelandon thought the Ritual was likely to be plot significant in scenarios, and so he didn't want to cause problems by setting loose parties who could have it on entering such a scenario. Having proposed this argument, I'm not sure I'm all that convinced by it, though.

Are you sure that the problem isn't that you're calling add_char_to_party from a creature script? I can't find the reference now, but I've been working on similar things today, and had issues with a call that could only be used from a town or dialogue script. I'm not sure whether there's a good way to deal with the creature being (sort of) dead already in the DEAD_STATE. In general spawn_creature() can be used to resurrect preset town creatures, but it may not be applicable in your situation. There is a low level sneaky way to bring things back to life, which is what I've found I need for what I'm doing, but I assume you want to avoid that if possible. (In addition to the fact that I still need to research the right magic numbers to use on Windows.) One way that you might work around this entire problem is that if you have exactly one case where you need to do this, you could just have a duplicate of the creature hidden 'off stage', and join that one to the party when the original dies. (You could do this for multiple cases as well, but it would get tedious for obvious reasons.) If you felt like being a little elaborate you could use place_monster to generate the double on the fly, but this way has multiple possible failure modes, and is probably easier to avoid if you don't need it.

Hey! At least I filled out the calendar!

Ah, that's it. I can probably find the thread now too if I look taking the date into account. Thanks! EDIT: To clarify matters: It seems that this idea appeared during blades chat (which I may have missed, at any rate I don't have a log from it), but the organizing thread associated with it can be found here.

You'll be happy to know that since you brought this back to my attention, I have updated my response to reflect that I really ought to be working on my contest entry right now. Which entailed removing the whole of this week.

At Celtic Minstrel's request, here's an editor update. This version fixes several small bugs that were floating around from last time, and includes a couple of small improvements: Fixed the terrain script highlight drawing bug, hopefully once and for all. Fixed redrawing after changes from lower left text line functions. Fixed bugs affecting selecting special rectangles outdoors and town entrances. Changed 'Reload Scenario Data' to properly reload corescendata first. Contained items are no lnonger drawn in the 'realistic' view mode. The editor is now less conservative about forcing items to be contained, it will now only automatically change an items containment if the item moves into or out of a container. A bit of a roadmap for what's likely to happen next, for anyone who cares: I've been working on some major changes which will extend the undo system throughout the editor. The intention is that every operation except the big, direct file alterations (adding and deleting towns, changing the outdoor size or a town's size) should be able to be undone. I'm maybe a quarter of the way through this, as I've implemented about half of the logic for rolling back different types of changes, but little of that is yet wired up to actually be used. Something else I've been wanting for sometime is to include Sparkle in the editor, so that I don't have to pester everyone with these threads. Particularly since thoroughly testing a finished Sparkle setup will be easier with a newer release (for Sparkle to notice and update to), I'm planning to do the Sparkle stuff first, then then put in the full undo system and any fixes to the updater mechanism.

I remember from somewhere a lengthy thread which detailed the research a couple of people had done into what I recall being a rather sophisticated method for working around joined NPCs not running their scripts properly/normally. I thought it was in the BoA forum on SV, and I looked here too, but I can't find it for anything. Can anybody point me in the right direction?

Um. . . I'll see what I can do. I haven't had time to work on this yet, and it will be a bit time consuming. If worst comes to worst, you can get your scenario finished using the test version of the editor, right?

Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel In Blades of Exile, its ability is "Strengthen Target", which is an ability that targets a hostile monster. I'm not entirely sure what this does, but I imagine you could find it in the game code; it's ability number is 128. Thanks, that's exactly the clue I needed. From do_combat_cast() in boe.combat.cpp it seems that this item ability adds 20 hp to the target.

Is it known what the exact effect of this item was in previous games? If so, I may want to reproduce it faithfully in the scenario I'm working on, otherwise I'll just improvise.

I just went for a walk and the whole outline of my entry's plot became clear to me upon reflection. I wish I'd managed this a week ago, but now I have the proper feeling of obsession to design in earnest.

Grrr. It looks like you win this time, Nikki and ES. I was looking somewhat seriously at working around your silly single outdoor section limit by overwriting the same outdoor section multiple times, and I'd have gotten away with it too, if not for Jeff's arbitrary token limit! It turns out that even with run length encoding it just isn't practical to generate floors, terrains, and heights for a realistic outdoor section in under 2^16-1 tokens, and for my scheme to work I would have needed it to fit it into few enough tokens to fit more than one overwrite into a single script. I think it could still be done using a host of unique terrain scripts (maybe just a flock, ~3 per overwrite) and the SDF array as a buffer, but between the level of complexity that would require and how late I've left this, I'll call off the attempt and come quietly. Curses, foiled again by the primitive script engine!

You can see an example of this in t9griffon in Diplomacy with the Dead. As a refinement of what Duck suggests, you might have the character approach the last character in the party, so that it follows without getting in the way at the front, and then make the distance to approach fairly small. You can also run approach_char() only if the target character is too far away, as t9griffon does.

Originally Posted By: Fractal BTW, when's the deadline, again? The end of Saturday, the 14th, GMT. Originally Posted By: The Turtle Moves if you can use a judge who's not a designer I assume that we certainly can. The judging is about playing the scenarios, not making them, after all.

It really isn't as hard (to my mind) mostly for the reason that there isn't much you can do. Two basic kinds of flow control, integer arithmetic, and various built-in functions you can call. I never remember the arguments for most of said built-in functions; I just look them up in the documentation. In C and C++ you have to (or get to) worry about: floating point math, arrays, pointers, functions, passing arguments by value, pointer, or reference, memory management, typedefs, structs, classes, unions, constructors, destructors, inheritance, overloaded operators, the preprocessor, and templates. These are all good and useful things, but not having any of them in Avernumscript certainly makes things simple (if restrictive). It really only gets hard when you try to do something it isn't meant to do, which can really be avoided most of the time in normal scenario designing.

I, for one, will be happy to convert graphics for any PC user who needs this done, and can be contacted through niemandcw(at)gmail(dot)com. There is one key point to be aware of (for those who haven't dealt with this before): The resulting file will be ruined if handled directed by basically any non-Mac OS. The usual way to handle this is that the conversion is done as the final step, so the designer provides the person doing the conversion with a complete, finished copy of the scenario in the form usable by the Windows version of the game. The person doing the conversion makes a copy, replacing the loose bmp files with a single combined 'cmg' resource file, and packs up the copy, usually as a zip archive, and sends it back to the designer to be distributed. A possible alternative is to place only the cmg file in an archive, but most designers prefer not to do this, as it would require players to unpack the graphics manually after unpacking the scenario directory to complete installation.

Originally Posted By: boggle Yes, the “argument” posits that the “hole in the ozone layer is false” (since there is no “layer”, only a mathematical computation of how much ozone exists in a column of air from sea level to the outer reaches of the atmosphere. By virtue of the nature of its measurement, it is impossible to determine from a Dobson Unit reading WHERE (at what altitude) any particular concentration of ozone may exist. Yes, there are other ways to measure this. However, the oft-times shown “maps” published ad-nauseam each September purporting to show a “hole” over Antarctica are maps of Dobson Units and actually, by definition, show no such thing – only a general depletion of ozone exactly as predicated by Dobson on which to found his experiment. As has already been stated, there is portion of the stratosphere, defined by height, which contains most of the atmosphere's ozone. This is perfectly consistent with standard definitions and understandings of the idea of a 'layer': "A sheet, quantity, or thickness of material, typically one of several, covering a surface or body". Quote: ‘Scuse me? Dobson’s whole hypothesis was that there shouldn’t be much ozone at all in winter – the fact that there was more than there should have been was his basis for experiment. Yes, it is most depleted in winter – just as it should be – it just isn’t depleted as much as should be accounted for by the complete absence of sunlight. I admit that I haven't had the time to research this very carefully, but it isn't clear to me why Dobson's work would 'disprove' the existence of the ozone hole: Dobson's major papers were published in 1968 and 1973, and he died in 1975. According to skimming the Wikipedia article, indirect evidence of ozone depletion was experimentally observed beginning around the mid 1970's: Quote: In 1974 Frank Sherwood Rowland, Chemistry Professor at the University of California at Irvine, and his postdoctoral associate Mario J. Molina suggested that long-lived organic halogen compounds, such as CFCs, might behave in a similar fashion as Crutzen had proposed for nitrous oxide. . . . within three years most of the basic assumptions made by Rowland and Molina were confirmed by laboratory measurements and by direct observation in the stratosphere. and the actual 'ozone hole' was discovered in 1985: Quote: The discovery of the Antarctic "ozone hole" by British Antarctic Survey scientists Farman, Gardiner and Shanklin (announced in a paper in Nature in May 1985) came as a shock to the scientific community, because the observed decline in polar ozone was far larger than anyone had anticipated. If I understand correctly, the theory is that ozone depletion only became severe, creating the detectable hole, after a large amount of CFC compounds had been released, meaning that this only happened after Dobson had not only ceased his work, but was also dead. His work is important because he described the seasonal variations which were present before depletion became a major effect, allowing depletion to be inferred by the observation of ozone levels lower than those observed by Dobson, and others, in earlier decades. Quote: Anybody want to direct me to a study ANYWHERE that supports this contention. Let me state the sentence a slightly different way, much closer to the truth: “Winter isn’t when STORIES APPEAR IN THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA about the Antarctic ozone hole though, THE STORIES APPEAR IN THE SPRING. I think that’s far closer to the truth. The reality is the stories appear at the end of winter (which is the beginning of spring), when the measured ozone depletion is at its highest. Outside of Dobson’s original work, I’ve never seen any figures anywhere on the state of depletion at any other time other than when the “maps” are printed in the newspapers in September. Is it slightly higher in August or October? Or July or November? Anybody got figures? A peer-reviewed paper perhaps? I'm afraid that not being an atmospheric scientist, I don't have such a citation handy, and I don't have the time just now to take a serious look. If you are seriously interested in this, I suggest that you make such a search yourself. It is, in fact not clear to me that you have actually read Dobson's papers; I just skimmed two of them, noting the discrepancy with dates, mentioned above. Also interesting is this statement, from the abstract of his 1973 paper: Originally Posted By: G. M. B. Dobson (1973) A region of minimum ozone is also sometimes found at heights of around 23 km but less frequently than at 15 km. These high level minima are only found in late summer or autumn and in very high latitudes. So, if significant depletion is observed in the winter or spring, it would suggest that new mechanisms are at work which were not present until after ~1970. Quote: So, after all that, “there IS a hole” – where? In what? We've been through this; it is perfectly sensible to talk about a 'layer' of ozone, and an area where that layer is thin or missing can be sensibly described as a 'hole'. Quote: a lab finally managed to “recreate” this entirely hypothetical chemical reaction in a lab If it was reproduced, anywhere at all, then it is clearly not 'hypothetical', but factual. The more correct question, which you were, I think, getting at, is whether it also occurs in the upper atmosphere. The wikipedia article on this subject cites a number of studies which claim to have found string evidence for various reactions destroying ozone. Again, I haven't had time to go read them yet, but I suggest that doing so would be a valuable step before dismissing their results. Quote: What this post normal science double-speak actually refers to. . . This phrase appears much less meaningful than the one you were using it to attack. Quote: . . . which “broke down” O3 to O2 (the natural fate of O3 molecules anyway). Sure, this is what ends up happening to the ozone in general, but your dismissal glosses over the central point: If the ozone is broken down by CFCs, it can't be broken down by UV radiation, thus absorbing some of that radiation. Quote: The offered “proof” that this was actually happening, was to record the incidence of hot, highly reactive chlorine ions in the upper atmosphere at the Antarctic, during the Ozone Minimum (September), and attribute the depletion to said hot, reactive chlorine molecules, which in turn were attributed to the breakdown of CFC’s. The fact that the readings were taken over an active volcano (Mount Erebus) which was spewing forth more hot, reactive chlorine in a year that the total amount available from the catalytic conversion of all the CFC’s ever produced by Mankind, ever, was entirely besides the point. If the experiment was conducted correctly, it may very well be entirely beside thet point: if the volcano is active pretty much all the time, and one observes an increase in chlorine at a particular time in the year, t is entirely plausible that the volcano isn't responsible. This is called 'distinguishing signal from background', and while not all experimenters always do it correctly, they are trained, by and large, to try. Also, I'm guessing that measurements have been conducted at other locations besides McMurdo. I find it interesting to note that the ozone hole can show up in odd ways; the experiment I work on regularly sees fluctuations (on top of the usual winter-summer variation) in cosmic ray muon rates that match up neatly with the behavior of the ozone hole, like a point a couple of years ago when it temporarily split into two separate holes.

The town script and town dialogue scripts need to be separate, yes. (Some towns may not have a dialogue, though.) The files are just plain ASCII text, which can be created and edited with Notepad, but also any other text editor you may prefer, so long as it can save without any formatting. It really isn't very complicated, it just groups the code for separate purposes into separate files.