Dintiradan

I've experienced it before, and as far as I can recall, the only time it ever happens to me is when I'm trying to corner something, as you've noted. I'm guessing there's a bug that occurs when creatures with low courage have nowhere to escape (see the BoA calls get_courage and set_courage). It shouldn't be to hard to test this hypothesis in BoA. -------------------- Hey! Some of my best friends are 3rd level fighters! - Roy (OotS #64)

A4 had crocolisks. By Diki: Quote: Would Dikiyoba say this if the question was about dinosaurs instead of crocodiles? It would be tempting, but the answer would still be no. Sorry, but dinosaurs in a fantasy setting are not something I enjoy. That, and my instinctive dislike of any creature that has a Swallow Whole ability. By Thuryl: Quote: Yes. Also, their attacks did fire damage for some reason. The tigers in Canopy are capable of speech, and you're worried about fire damage? -------------------- His ears are too big. He looks like an ape. - Talent Scout on Clark Gable

By Aran: Quote: A final nitpick: "die unless tryThis" makes no sense at all from the readability perspective. Are you expecting an error and surprised if it doesn't occur? That's what it looks like... Actually, the only reason I posted that example is because my instructor always wrote that way. Usually, I write Code: fclose($name) || die "Error"; But for some strange reason people find that unreadable. Basically, the use of STATEMENT unless CONDITION in Perl stems from Larry's decision not to have naked if statements like C does. Sort of like having elsif because he thinks elseif is ugly... -------------------- C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.

By Aran: Quote: Yes, it's "while", not "until". (Which supposedly exists in some interpreted languages. I find it hard to believe - what part of "!" is so inconvenient?) Perl has unless as an alternative to if. The only time I use it is in cases like Code: die "Cannot open file: $!\n" unless fclose($name);# I think I'll leave this typo Not to useful, though I find having the condition after the statement sometimes makes more sense than a naked if. I've never seen until, though. -------------------- Who needs if when you have Boolean operators?

My scenario's short, boring, and has a plot hole the size of Montreal, yet I'm still planning to release it. When I get around to it. Eventually. -------------------- Belkar: The only thing I can do with a scroll is beat someone to death with it. Vaarsuvius: Belkar, you are a RANGER!! Belkar: So what? That just means I can beat him with both scrolls at the same time!! Vaarsuvius: No, it means you could cast healings - or at least, you COULD if you did not possess a Wisdom score normally reserved for lemmings. (OotS #58)

I dunno. So much of BoA and AvernumScript is work-arounds. I realize that things like this aren't a priority, but still... -------------------- Sabine: What a great evil mastermind speech, baby. Nale: I worked on it all night! (OotS #57)

By Eph: Quote: Of course, if someone tries to attack me, they're going down. Yes, that's Standard Adventurer Response. In fact, that's what my D&D group fell prey to two sessions ago (I was in the midst of Crunch Time, so I couldn't intervene). Suffice to say that killing the only source of information about a curse that's been placed on you is a Bad Idea. -------------------- Immaculate Reception: The fact that Joseph and Mary could throw a welcoming party in Bethlehem for the Three Wise Men despite having no caterer.

As far as I can recall, the only vital quest givers in the game other than the mage at Fort Avernum dwell in the Castle. Rone's involved in the same quest that Vidrain is. His assistant also gives out a series of major quests (they may not be vital to finishing the game, though). The two main NPCs in the Abyss can make your life a little easier, but it's still possible to finish the game if you kill both before you finish their quests. One more thing: don't kill trainers. I almost killed Starcap in Almaria. EDIT: See Thuryl's post below. -------------------- Stiff, unappealing. You ain't got it, kid. - Jerry Tokovsky to Harrison Ford, 1965

By Slarty: Quote: I haven't used it in A2, so perhaps it was weaked, but Mindduel was a real killer in E2. It was, after all, designed to be the reasonable way to defeat the final boss. A2 took that last bit out, which annoys me tremendously. You seem to be saying that mindduel was present in A2. Am I having a brain fart right now? I don't remember anything like that. -------------------- For the humble doily is indeed the gateway to ULTIMATE COSMIC POWER!! Back to you, Sir Greenhilt. - Vaarsuvius (OotS #33)

You didn't make any backups of your own? Ouch. -------------------- One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs. - Robert Firth

Specifically, the rune in the northern end of the Tower (the only building on the west side of the river). You step on the rune, and the wall slides away (the Darkside Loyalists seem to be fixated on sliding walls). -------------------- This is the grave of Mike O'Day Who died maintaining his right of way. His right was clear, his will was strong. But he's just as dead as if he'd been wrong. - Epitaph in England

By Laz: Quote: You're my hero. Second that motion. By the by, is there a simple way to disable sounds in the editor? There's been a number of requests for that. -------------------- I am not a chauvinist, obviously... I believe in women's rights for every woman but my own. - Harold Washington

You forgot Control Foes, which really changed the way I played A4 when I got it. For the first half, the game was all about sneaking around, nailing each foe off one by one. However, the minute you got Control Foes, you could charm nearly anyone (no more ranks in Control Foe like in previous games). Once you got the spell, you stopped taking groups down one enemy at a time. Instead, you barrelled into them. As long as a couple of enemies were charmed at any point in time, you were okay. (I think Delicious Vlish pointed out that in Geneforge this tactic works better in Torment. Probably the same in Avernum.) As for Mass Haste... I dunno, but I always found it a bit unbalancing. You can still do fine in A4 with it. The 'race to Haste' was one of the few challenges of early battle. Besides, you have Mass Haste scrolls and rods you can use in a pinch. -------------------- If God wanted us to use the metric system, Jesus would have had ten apostles. - Jesse Helms

I searched the results of running astring on the A4 scripts folder, and all I found was one string in questnpc.txt: "Marsh worm". I don't remember any quest dealing with them in the game. (By the way, where did you come across those lines? I can't find them here , and that could mean astring has a bug.) -------------------- Hmmm. Pronoun trouble. - Daffy Duck

I searched the results of running astring on the A4 scripts folder, and all I found was one string in questnpc.txt: "Marsh worm". I don't remember any quest dealing with them in the game. (By the way, where did you come across those lines? I can't find them here , and that could mean astring has a bug.) -------------------- Hmmm. Pronoun trouble. - Daffy Duck

By Eph: Quote: Listening to comedy, though... that's another story. That makes it really difficult to focus on the giant cockroaches without laughing. And it's even worse when you're trying to code stuff in BoA. Oddly enough, I enjoy music when I'm coding, but need absolute silence when debugging. Therefore, unless I'm doing something so easy I can get it right on the first try, I don't listen to music. Speaking of which, is there a version of the BoA 3D Editor that has no sounds? It'd be nice to listen to music during town design. -------------------- Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. - Brian W. Kernighan

Now that I've finished A4, I got around to fixing up astring ( previous thread ). The program now satisfies all your string extracting needs. Mostly a few minor changes (converting between underscores and double quotes, better recovery from errors, etc.); the biggest is that it works for Mac .txt files too. I also fixed the bug that gave some users an unsightly rash; thanks to those who noticed this. You can download it at http://freewebs.com/dintiradan/astring.zip -------------------- The best way to predict the future is to implement it. - David Heinemeier Hansson

The best idea I can come up with right now that allows for using the default spells is checking the PCs' energy at the end of every turn, and writing some code to guess what spells they cast. Very ugly, and haste and extra AP could screw things up, not to mention priest/mage multiclassers. -------------------- Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning. - Rick Cook

The loss of Divine Warrior and Beast Ceremony is to be mourned (though A4's Arcane Shield is like Beast Ceremony without the Haste). I actually used A4's Retribution, though: by the time you got it in A3, you mage could well outdo the priest with a good Fireblast. The best part of A4's spells is how Divine Host summons one shade. -------------------- He who hasn't hacked assembly language as a youth has no heart. He who does as an adult has no brain. - John Moore

I'm finally getting around to finishing A4 (so much for working on BoA... I'm so weak). I'm wondering if any else has noticed the chronic ease that A4 suffers from. When playing the Avernum Trilogy, I got into the habit of not investing skill points until the game got so difficult that I had to. It kept the games challenging and sated my compulsive need to min-max. Usually, I invested when I had around 30 points kicking around. I just finished the Abyss this morning in A4, and I did a quick tally of my current situation. My party's level is in the mid-thirties (no traits on anyone), and if I remember correctly, I haven't invested skill points since the Eastern Gallery (other than a few exceptions: Mage and Priest, Tool Use, and occasionally bumping up my slith's Quick Action so it acts before my nephil). My mage has around twenty points kicking around, my priest, thirty. My slith pole-fighter has nearly sixty. My nephil archer has ninety-eight points left. Moreover, I have never once sold an emerald, ruby, or focusing crystal, nor have I used a Knowledge Brew or Crystal. So what gives (yes, I'm playing on Torment)? Does the game assume that you aren't a nook 'n' cranny player? Or does the game place much more emphasis on level and items than on skill levels? -------------------- The required techniques of effective reasoning are pretty formal, but as long as programming is done by people that don't master them, the software crisis will remain with us and will be considered an incurable disease. And you know what incurable diseases do: they invite the quacks and charlatans in, who in this case take the form of Software Engineering gurus. - Edsger Dijkstra

A4 finally give you a chance to squash the little buggers once and for all. Youpi! -------------------- Teaching BASIC should be a criminal offense. - Edsger Dijkstra

I don't think that the place where demons come from is ever refered to 'Hell' in the Vogel Canon (Easter Eggs aside). The most you get is an allusion to the 'nether planes'. Check out the Encyclopaedia: Demons and Aimee . EDIT: Ah, seems I'm repeating what Diki and Alo have said. Oh well, my links are prettier. -------------------- Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California. - Edsger Dijkstra

Not in the same way the previous games have them. Occasionally, someone will tell you about a secret passage. When you walk near it, you'll get a pop-up telling you about it, and the walls will change so you can enter. There's no 'headbanging' against walls in Avernum 4. Just be thankful I'm not in a sadistic enough mood today to tell you that there is for the express purpose of wasting your time. EDIT: Curses! Beaten to it. -------------------- I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself: 'Dijkstra would not have liked this', well that would be enough immortality for me. - Edsger Dijkstra

The Avernum trilogy has regular sized creatures and tall creatures, but no long creatures. It would be a lot harder to implement enemies that take up more than one tile. Mad Ambition (BoA) has cavalry. However, you can't keep the horse when you kill them (though now that I think about it, I could be possible...). -------------------- Write a paper promising salvation, make it a 'structured' something or a 'virtual' something, or 'abstract', 'distributed' or 'higher-order' or 'applicative' and you can almost be certain of having started a new cult. - Edsger Dijkstra

Sorry, I view my Freewebs as more of a file server than a website. I've updated the index page and placed a link to astring. Just click on the WWW icon above my post. It works for me, so I can't help you any further (I can download this link by either left-clicking or right-clicking->save as). If that doesn't work, I can't help you. In all likelihood, I will not make my site pretty until I have something useful to host (i.e. a scenario). -------------------- The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence. - Edsger W. Dijkstra