Dintiradan

Remember, the primary reason why most RPGs award experience based on monster kills is not because the players 'deserved' that experience, it's to balance the players' innate abilities with their ill-gotten loot. In low-magic settings, where a high level character's items have about the same power as a lower level character's items, experience can be awarded whenever the computer/GM wants. In tabletop games, you can even choose to level up by consensus. Personally, I think awarding experience by kill should be avoided, especially in tabletop games. Players gravitate to the actions that give them experience, and besides, no one likes to stop playing because someone just levelled up and needs to read the rules (other than the lucky character). Awarding experience by accomplishment tells the players that they should explore all their options and take the one that gives them the best chance of success (or the most fun one), as opposed to attacking by default. As long as the GM keeps track of wealth per character level (where applicable), it's a good system. Unfortunately, it doesn't work as well in CRPGs, especially open-ended ones. Imagine if Exile/Avernum 1 only gave experience when you completed a quest. Would work decently if the player completed the quests in a sane order. But if you do the quests 'out of sequence', it's virtually impossible. You're forcing the player to play the game in a linear fashion. (Yes, I suppose this ties into sidequest grinding. Bit of a Johnny-Come-Lately here.) Linear games allow the experience model that Alorael talked about (gain a large amount of experience after every chapter). If the Geneforge games were more linear, this could have been done by making canisters award experience, and be the only way to gain experience. More believable that the 'what doesn't kill me makes me stronger' paradigm? You decide. One discarded idea I had, which possibly could have been implemented in Blades of Avernum, was a game where the powerful protagonist has been poisoned and loses levels over the course of the game. Would it work when it comes to the story? Probably. Would it be fun? Probably not. Would it cater to Jeff's 'adolescent power fantasy'? No.

Alorael and Thuryl make good points. Another way to balance Thuryl's suggestion would be to give the Shaper a limited spell list. That way a level 10 Shaper could cast summoning spells the same way a level 10 Wizard could (likely with some bonuses), but wouldn't be able cast other spells as well. Animal companions and familiars aren't good benchmarks for the Shaper's power - maybe what you should look into is the Evil Cleric's ability to control undead. I'm not too sure of the exact mechanics of this - the last D&D session I played was the first time we had our resident Evil Cleric come across undead. Unfortunately, 'Hack' and 'Slash', our pet undead pirate zombies, set off one trap too many. A shame.

Mod parent up.

They still call that area Moab? Anyway, all the best for the trip.

Quote: C++ is an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog. Seriously though, why C++?

Could you post the script for that town, and for the outdoor section that the town entrance is located in?

Wait, you people think it's annoying when someone says that global warming isn't real because it's cold or snowing? Try moving up here, where some inane idiot says it every five bloody minutes. @Jewels: Trade your snow for our snow. Yes, it's melting, but we still have drifts of it. Actually, y'know what? I don't need you to take the snow - just our sand. We're already getting those picturesque mounds of grit that get heaped on the boulevards every spring. </grump>

Sounds fun, Smoo, though I won't have a chance to play it until sometime after Tuesday. I was hoping to come out with something this year, but strep throat got in the way. Youpi for penicillin!

Avernum 4 spoiler: Click to reveal.. Quote: and we wait resurrection at A6. At which point she'll resurrect Rentar-Ihrno as an undead Crystal Soul, just to torture her.

It may be that the tutorial is complicated because scripting itself is complicated. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is. There's no silver bullet, nor is there an Easy Button. Sooner or later, if you want to anything complicated, you'll have to read the docs. -- Still here? Very well. Many people learn better with examples, as opposed to getting the theory taught to them. There's a few different resources out there that may help you. If you read the header for this forum, you'll notice that Kelandon, a scenario designer, is hosting a Frequently Asked Questions page for designers. This FAQ is useful, and also links to a document entitled Basic Scripting For Complete Beginners. This article does exactly what it says on the tin. Another document that may be useful to you is a Cookbook by Erik Westra, which teaches you how to script the most common problems you'll encounter. Since Erik doesn't appear to be an active member anymore, Kelandon is hosting the Cookbook here. Thanks, Kel! By the way, have you checked the <title> tag on the cookbook page recently? ;-) EDIT: For reference, I wrote this before Enraged Slith made his excellent post. I'm a bit more RTFMy.

IANAL (here 'L' stands for 'linguist'), but check out Wikipedia. For what it's worth, I pronounce Kalandha as ka-LAN-tha, rather than ka-LAND-ha.

Doubtful. I wasn't involved when Blades of Exile's source was released, but I remember that a lot of the initial problems were related to tracking down the source. That, and OBoE was viewed as a gift to the community, where Jeff could wash his hands of it afterwards. A closed development would require more effort from him, not less.

What do mean when you say "not going to read all the books"? I can see picking a certain book to stop and say enough's enough, but the series doesn't really allow skipping books in the sequence.

This is the best table setup I've seen yet. I've tried cajoling my DM into doing the same, but for some reason he's against mounting a projector on the ceiling of his dining room.

D&D has very few monsters that are completely unique and created by TSR/WotC. The Open Gaming License lists only eleven creatures that are unique enough to be considered Product Identity. Even some members of this list are derived from other sources: A Carrion Crawler is a centipede. A freakishly big and scary centipede with a host of other features, but a centipede nonetheless. Tanar’ri and Baatezu: Demons and devils. Again, specific features are mentioned for the subraces. Illithid/Mind Flayer: Unique enough, but the Lovecraftian influence is apparent. Yuan-ti: Part human, part snake? I've heard that before. There are some truly unique creatures (Beholders, Displacer Beasts, the giths), but for the large part, they're bastardized versions of legends. The big thing is that these bastardizations are now standardized. Exile/Avernum doesn't pit you against goblins who are crafty and steal children at night. It pits you against tribal beings who are weak, stupid, and ugly. And woe to the setting creator who makes elves with dark skin and doesn't also give them red eyes and spiders as pets.

That said, we will talk your ear off after the movie. (Also, Toby-Linn, you stole my future avatar! Pout.) Click to reveal.. What do y'all think about the "No Squidy" rumours?

Picture Book Classics. Good stuff. My mother picked up three copies at Costco for $4.50 each, which was ridiculously low priced. I was reading 'Harold and the Purple Crayon' to Nephew tonight, and thought to myself that, surely, there's an animated feature based on this by now. Yep, there is. Oh, and using Google to spell-check 'ridiculously' (that still looks wrong) lead me to read A Ridiculously Short History of Time.

Paint the object underneath the cursor? Even if you're able to create a custom cursor on the fly, most people wouldn't appreciate it if the custom cursor remained after the user mouses out of the editor window. Nifty idea, though it's probably a good idea to give the user the option to turn the behaviour off.

Originally Posted By: Ishad Nha Now I will need to take out to read the Tortoise manual. TortoiseSVN is a great shell extension. Makes the most common SVN task incredibly easy, and you can view the status of files with an icon overlay. The diff that comes with it is my favourite feature; it helps immensely when viewing a file's log, and makes merging conflicted files much easier (you are, of course, on your own with merging binary files, but them's the breaks). If it's your first time using Subversion (or any version control system), I'd suggest you read the book on it. It's huge, so don't read it all, but the first few chapters give a great overview of version control in general. Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel But why are there two separate repositories? Probably because it's the simplest way of doing things right now. Ideally, you'd like to split the code into three packages: Windows-only code, Macintosh-only code, and the common code, which (again, ideally) performs all the logic and delegates resource loading and whatnot appropriately. Then you'd have two 'workspace' projects in svn, one for Windows and one for Macintosh. With the magic of svn externals, each would reference the necessary packages, as well as contain the needed build scripts.

I could be mistaken, but I thought that Doomguard division only happened when there was a nearby space for the newly split Doomguard to appear in. If you fired an arrow at a Doomguard at the centre of a pack, does it split? I remember one time Cloud of Blades being effective against a Doomguard pack, when it was in a smallish room. There is another way of defeating a Doomguard, probably not intended by Jeff. Admittedly, this is a very cheap way of doing it. Click to reveal.. If you have access to Capture Soul/Simulacrum, try to capture the soul of a Basilisk or Ur-Basilisk. While Doomguards are supposed to be immune to magical damager, they are susceptible to stoning. Summon the Basilisk at a distance, and make sure no one damages the sole Doomguard.

(Erm, I was halfway through this post before I thought about the fact that you might be using a Mac instead of a Windows laptop. What follows below assumes you're using Windows.) Hmmm. The short answer is maybe, but after a lot of work. As I see it, you have three options: Dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu on your laptop. That is, you partition your hard drive in half, keep Windows on one half and install Ubuntu on the other. I have dual-boot Vista/Ubuntu at home, but I don't know how difficult it is to partition your hard drive without wreaking existing data. I just bought a second hard drive and installed Linux on that. When you turn on your laptop, you'll be given the option of booting up Ubuntu or Windows. All you have to do is install Avernum 5 on the Windows partition. This is probably the best solution, allowing you to run Avernum 5 and any other Windows programs you want natively. However, you will have two operating systems installed on your hard drive (though only one will be running at a time). If space is an issue, this won't work. Also, as you said, you find Windows slow on your laptop, so this might also be a problem. On the other hand, the next two solutions will be slow ones as well. Look into running a virtual machine. I use VMWare Player at work. What you do is take an 'image' of one computer. Then, you can send that image to another computer, which may have a different OS, architecture, whatever. When you load the image, VMWare player acts as a virtual machine (hence the name), faking the underlying hardware and letting you run a Windows OS in a Linux environment. The downside of this is creating the image. VMWare Player can be downloaded without cost, but VMWare's program for creating images must be bought. It's possible that there are free programs available for creating images; I've never needed to look into them before. Also, running software on a virtual machine will always be slower than running the software natively. Not by a horrible amount, but still significant. The final option is to use Wine. I've never used Wine, so you're on your own on this one. Also, other people have tried to make older Spiderweb Software games work with WINE and failed. Maybe it's possible that the newer games and newer versions of Wine will work together, but don't keep your hopes up. EDIT: Thuryl's already directed you to Wine, I see. Hopefully that works out. To sum up my post and throw in my two cents: dual-boot if your computer is capable of it, and use Wine otherwise. Use a virtual machine as a last resort, and even then it's probably not worth it. Let us know how things turn out.

Originally Posted By: Slarty I think this is what I get for having been trained in Pascal, and then never going on to do much in a "real" programming language. Darn outdated AP exams! I dunno, I think that by now a REAL Programming Language should have a smart enough compiler for automatic conversion between primitive types. But what do I know - I also eat quiche.

I've mentioned something similar on Shadow Vale, but the only thing stopping the movie Twilight from being a classic is Wesley Snipes.

Just to be a smarter alec: Beethoven still had his hearing when he wrote his earlier works. Likewise, it's possible for an experienced designer to create a scenario without testing it. However, the original poster had never designed before, and moreover had just started playing the game itself. Someone blind from birth would be a horrible painter.

Master1: Learning the scripting language by looking at the examples in Geneforge is a great way to go. If you want a more in-depth explanation, download the Blades of Avernum scenario editor, even if you don't own the game. Contained in the download is documentation for Blades of Avernum's scripting language. There may be differences between the two games, but reading the documentation (sections 2.8 to 2.16) will give you a general idea of how things work. Alorael & Walker White: Most of the time when people call something a C/C++ language, they just mean that it's an imperative language with curly brace syntax (as opposed to Lisp's parentheses and functional nature, or Python's mandatory whitespace). Even calling AvernumScript (or GeneforgeScript) an imperative language is misleading, as it's based on the concept of a finite state machine. At any rate, it's certainly not procedural.