Niemand

I think Kelandon's method is how you'll have to do it. The party splitting calls only make the party temporarily into a singleton.

Thanks Khoth. I was meaning to get around to emailing you sooner. Sorry. The entire thing will be open source when I get it done, and I am planning to make some slight additions to Alint; it has given me a few bad results with te_ed_icon_adjust and a couple of other things.

Update again:

So I've now added a quick generator for full dialog boxes, I've got template files for an empty creature script, an empty terrain script, an empty town script, and basicnpc (I intend to make more, also.). There is also a code snippet manager function now: you can define your own code snippets for quick use, each is represented in a menu, and the first nine are assigned keyboard shortcuts. When you press the keyboard shortcut or select the menu item, the snippet is inserted into the current document.

What I'm now working on is making the preferences window. So far it allows you to turn on and off text wrapping, syntax coloring, and unmatched brace highlighting, as well as setting all of the colors used in syntax highlighting. So I want to ask potential users: what else would you want to be able to set or customize?

I'm surprised to learn that that does work, but that is what the end() call is supposed to be used for. It shouldn't make any difference that I can see which you use then, based on what the documentation says, but I'm going to stick with end; I'm still wary that using break might have some odd side effect. (After all, so many things in Avernumscript seem to.)

Update:

Kelandon: Bracket checking is in. It proved to be a lot of work, but I'll agree that it's useful. I had to implement it in a kind of clumsy way though, so while it seems to be okay on 1000+ line scripts, I may need to improve it for better efficiency. It also does parentheses as suggested by Thralni.

Lazarus: for the force_terrain_redraw(),pause() thing I got to thinking it might be both good and possible to let users create their own snippets to be added via a set of short cuts. I'll have to work on the idea. A full-blown dialog box generator is a good idea, I'll definitely be putting that in. As for nested loops, one can make a section of code, use the loop generator to surround it with a loop using one variable, then surround that with a another loop using another variable. Hopefully that will be flexible enough and simple enough to be a convenient system to use.

Dintiradan: Well, you'll have to start out by teaching me about GUI frameworks for Windows. . . To all the windows users, I'm genuinely sorry not to able to do it, but a port is just more than I think I could handle. Being a cocoa program for Mac OS this is written in Objective-C, and makes extensive use of NSMutableAttributedStrings, NSTextStorage, and so forth that I would have no idea how to reproduce using Windows native frameworks. The best solution would be for someone who does know more about programming on Windows to make an equivalent program.

Thralni: While the line numbers and syntax highlighting don't differ greatly from Textwrangler, (which I do think is a great program, by the way.) it allows the user to check the script using Alint without leaving the application, marks the lines that Alint reported errors on, and has the code snippet generators. I don't expect this program to be spectacular in it's additional features, I'm hoping to make it possible to spend more time in a single application when writing scripts, and do simple, repetitive scripting tasks more efficiently. Lastly, you idea of script templates is great and I will definitely look into it.

And finally, I really just have to agree with Nemesis' analysis of the best way to solve every problem related to using Windows.

Ok, that sounds like the right number. I guessed ~90 because Jeff wrote a comment in some scripts that said, "States you write yourself should be numbered from 10-100."

Ah! Thank you!

So despite the many other things I should have been doing this weekend, this is what I've been working on: A text editor specifically for writing Avernumscript. At the moment it displays line numbers, includes the ability to use Alint to check scripts, has a function to count characters in the selection (for avoiding overlong strings), has a jump to line number function, and has functions to insert basic code for a while loop and for a one shot dialog message. I'm curious to know if other people have ideas for features that would be useful, particularly new types of quick code snippet generators.

I want to also warn Windows users that I have no intention to port this program should I finish it. It would require a total rewrite of ~95% of the code using different libraries, and I would have to learn what I was doing every step of the way.

Also, can anyone remind me who actually wrote Alint? I would like to ask that person's permission to bundle it with this script editor.

In general you don't have to be too stingy with states, you have about 90 available per town, and very few towns need very many of them. The scripts are a lot easier to read and fix if they are more thoroughly broken down into separate states.

The item_of_class_on_spot() call only checks for items of that special class, set by it_special_class. Did you redefine the greatsword and slith spear so that this property is set to 2 and 1 respectively on these items?

No, as Dintridan said, it's best to use a file format that doesn't contain font information. Notepad is an easy way to do that on Windows, on Mac OS, TextEdit is good, but you have to set the default new document type to 'Plain text', I think the starting default is 'Rich text', which you don't want.

One way that you can check a file (at least on a Mac, since it works with Internet Explorer, I'm guessing it'll work on a PC) is to save your file and give it a .txt extension, then open it using a webbrowser. If you see a bunch of junk like:

 {\fonttbl\f0\fnil\fcharset77 GillSans;}{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;} 

A2! I very much agree with Ephesos, Tyran, and Alorael about the atmosphere of it, particularly in the Dark Waters area. That, and locations like the Empire Archives and Halls of Chaos had a wonderful feeling of mystery. There were always interesting new surprises, like meeting null bugs for the first time, or stepping into the Archives and seeing the odd sight of the ice water floor.

Sorry, I didn't make my question clear, I guess. I'm familiar with how the A4 Ap system differs from the other Avernums, I was wondering how the GF4 system was different.

1. Terrains 194 and 195 are also signs. I also successfully turned a shrub into a sign just now, so it seems to work on any terrain. Just do te_special_property = 39;.

2. It should be; these only act as beam projectors because of te_special_property settings. In theory you can overwrite these with non beam projectors, and make other terrains that are beam projectors.

3. I haven't had a chance to test this.

4. Don't mess with any terrains with numbers less than 74. If I remember rightly, the game likes it's walls the way they are. Other than that you should be able to do anything you want.

With everything working well to the best of my knowledge, I would like to announce the release of my new version of the 3D Blades of Avernum Editor.

As anyone who has been following the discussion around here will know, it adds a number of features and fixes some bugs. Notably it add terrain copy and paste, along with undo and redo for drawing operations. Hopefully it will make some of the more tedious aspects of scenario design a little easier. So, if you're interested, you can find it here .

As a side note, yes, I'm working on the windows version. It's not going too well; windows doesn't like me any more than I like it, and it isn't cooperating. With luck I'll be making better progress soon though.

Kelandon: I think (and hope!) that you noticed this with an older version. I just checked with the most recent compiled version, and it does undo changes made by the autohills feature. But, if there's some situation in which it doesn't that I haven't found, please do let me know.

Ephesos: I'm in two minds about this. The goal of the undo system as it stands now is to handle all changes in terrains, floors, and heights. I could make it undo other actions, like adding or altering special rectangles, there are two difficulties. The first is technical: it would require significant reworking of the system to make it understand other types of changes. The second is more important, and that is then unclear where the undo system should stop. It just isn't practical to undo some things, like changing the icon shifts on a placed item. There are literally hundreds of unique minor actions like this, and some complicated atomic actions like altering a creature's settings. As it is the limits of the system are clear cut; expanding it to do more things would blur them and potentially make a host of new actions eligible for inclusion.

At this time, I don't want to mess with this. Maybe in a future version I can't add more undo functionality, but at the moment I want to wrap this version up.

Ishad Nha: Hopefully after I get done I will have a version that will compile right. If you personally want a list of fixes now, I can try to put one together, but otherwise I won't bother. Honestly, the average user of the editor is not expected to be recompiling it, as Jeff points out in his comments at the beginning of the main file.

As to the item shortcuts: this doesn't really seem to be in much demand. Since the game has strict limits on the number of items in a town, I at least place even useless scenery items pretty deliberately.

EDIT: I think I got random item placement basically fixed: it no longer tries to place items out of bounds or always with 100% probability. I can now fill Fort Talrus with bread and coins! (These are items 1-4, used as a test. The resulting image amused me.)

Ok, I'll take a look at those item functions.

Ishad Nha: Yes, there are some minor tweaks you have to make to get the code to compile on Dev-C++. Fix those eleven things it was objecting to and it will work.

*Bump*

Beta-testers of the Mac version: I haven't heard from any of you in a while; which I assume to mean everything is well. If not, let me know, because I want to get the Mac version released publicly.

Ephesos: I can't describe how happy I am that it's working again. That issue was driving me crazy because I couldn't figure out what to do about it. Apparently, waiting was the answer.

Dahak: Really? That's odd; I just ported VotD successfully using Jeff's editor, version 1.1. However, see the next point:

I think I've been able to solve, or at least work around the problem with porting BoE scenarios. I order to generate many of the files, the editor has to print out strings containing " characters. Obviously since these denote string constants in C code, you can't put one into a string constant. Jeff's solution was to use ~ characters instead, and have a piece of code that replaces them with " characters. The chunk of code was very short, simple, and logical, and I still can't understand why it wasn't working. But it wasn't. However, I realized that there is a very standard and obvious solution to the quotes-within-a-string problem: escape sequences. (There was much forehead smacking for not thinking of this sooner.) I initially wondered if there was some reason that these wouldn't work here, since they specifically hadn't been used, but they do work just like always, and I can now port VotD without the program crashing. /technical ramble.

Also, I've gotten the Windows editor running using Dev-C++, so I'm beginning the process of catching it up with the Mac version.

Testers, I sent you the newest version.

Looking back over peoples' comments I noticed that they said the BoE import feature was broken, and I also find it to be. I haven't been able to fix it yet as the problem is somewhat unpredictable. It has to do with writing the quote characters in script files, but some of them write correctly while others just don't. I'll try to fix it, but since this isn't a feature most people are using very often and it can be done using the original editor, it won't be my highest priority.

*bump*

So I've implemented a couple of final features:

-Added 'Change Town Size' function for changing the size of an existing town

-Made the 3D editing area the same size as in BoA itself

-Added a toggle to set whether height labels are displayed in all drawing modes when in 2D view mode, or just in height mode

Would those of you who tested before mind trying out (hopefully) one last version?

Assuming that all goes well in testing I will declare the Mac version ready and release it. Then I'll just have to find the right software to get the Windows version to compile so I can work on that. The Windows source code comes as a neatly set up project, does anyone know what IDE works with it?

Yes, that's what I was referring to.