Ishad Nha

"The Black Sickness :: A Blades of Avernum Thing"

Is there something that I am missing here or is this another broken link? I just keep getting hit with:

"Not Found

The requested URL /boa/ was not found on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

--------------------------------------------------

Apache/1.3.37 Server at www.devever.net Port 80"

Alint is a useful program which has pointed out most of the errors in the file used to port Exile scenarios into Avernum. It does have a few errors itself though.

First there is a mistake with “fl_shimmers”, the Alint source code shows it as “floor_shimmers”. So to Alint “fl_shimmers” is always wrong while “floor_shimmers” is always right. Then te_cutaway_second_icon is spelled as “te_cutaway_second_item”. As far as I can see, the program does not recognize print_big_str_num. These errors can’t be fixed in the MS-Dos Prompt Edit command.

Then it won’t accept the Sanctification state in the sanctitem.txt.

“Checking file 'sanctitem.txt':

Error line 29: Bad beginstate line

Warning line 29: Result ignored”

As I learned the hard way, the variables in the various calls are not checked for magnitude. Thus for put_item_on_spot it accepted an item with the number 3,840.

(At some point I will have to check whether there is a problem with it not checking magnitudes of creatures and terrain types.)

Then it is unable to handle spaces between words in the title of a script. This is a problem for all scripts not just the ported ones. The Command Prompt can handle spaces in the names of directories. But it seems unable to handle spaces in the names of files, hence the flaw seems to be inherent in any command – line program.

May not detect the absence of the “i = i + 1;” in a while statement.

Looking in the Credits section of the game instructions I noticed the following:

Art - Andrew Hunter (Wormius@aol.com)

Design Assistant, Character Rendering - Linda Strout

Line Art - Brian Snoddy (streltsy@earthlink.net)

I would guess that it was the last one. The style is different to the Geneforge 2 pictures, and there the help file only shows Andrew Hunter. Certainly the style is very different to the cartoon - like Phil Foglio illustrations seen in the Avernum series.

Personally I find the Blades of Avernum graphics for Windows to be drab and unappealling. For natural outdoors settings they are way too angular, much like a skyscraper.

The Geneforge 4 interface is quite good, the only problems that I have seen are:

you are never told exactly what your maximum essence is, you have to calculate it yourself,(the maximum remaining essence after you have made a creation.)

you have to click on the question mark to bring up a list of the relevant creation's hp and energy, there is no quick list of how all the creations are doing

it is generally "retro", that is true, but you can work around or get used to it.

Kyshakks are good meatshields but their damage is not so great against the most powerful monsters, the latter tend to resist most of it. Now Wingbolts are good but they tend to rapidly run out of spell energy, and some of those running battles can be long. Generally the magic creations tend to rapidly exhaust their energy.

Drakons are tough in melee and good at ranged combat, generally the fire creations tend not to use too much energy over time.

Turabi Gate isn't passable because there is nowhere to go to. Looking in the Data folder I can only find 2 outdoors maps, the north and the south.

If you really want to use the features of a town in an outdoor fight you can borrow an idea from the Exodus scenario. Create a real town, have the fight take place there, then make the town invisible when the PCs leave it, this would use the Exit state:

beginstate EXIT_STATE;

set_town_visibility(12,0);

break;

Floor and terrain types can only call Scenario script states, they do this as part of their special properties. To call anything else would involve the use of terrain scripts, one per square.

Why so bloodthirsty? Experience from Exodus shows that repeatedly webbing a PC makes him/her absolutely useless. Then there is sleep too. When you want to have the PC rejoin the party just cure the relevant effect(s).

Have you talked to the merchant Phasia himself in the SW quarter of Dhonal South Keep? He gives you a key and a quest here.

As for the alarming and dangerous weight of Living Tools&, I always drop them on the ground when entering an unexplored zone. Ditto anything else that might cause an encumbrance penalty. You can always go back to the zone entry and get the Tools when you are sure that you will need them.

Anything that requires 6+ Tools to open may have some easier means of opening anyway, a lever nearby or a reward for completing a quest.

Alint is really good but it is not perfect, there a few things wrong with it. But in between it and the error messages coming from the game itself, you should be well placed to spot errors.

It fails to detect some errors, illegal numbers for items&. Then it refuses to accept the sanctification state for some weird reason.

Khoth's Alint program is not perfect but it usually spots most errors. (It will always reject "fl_shimmers" as wrong, it does not check for the item numbers being in the correct range&&)

It can be found at:

http://home.sanbrunocable.com/~tommywatts03/utilities.html

In plain language this is Kelandon's page, as accessed from the Neat Links hyperlink on the home page. (The Neat Stuff link is broken.)

Copy the Alint program into the folder of the ported scenario; this avoids the need to move files to and from the Alint home directory. Remove spaces from the titles of all files being scanned, otherwise you can’t get the program to recognise the files. After each lot of alterations, hit the Up Arrow and Enter keys till the file comes up clean. Alint is not infallible, but between it and the Blades game you should be able to clean up the errors. Certain errors will not be detected by Alint but the game itself will give error messages.

Khoth's Alint program is not perfect but it usually spots most errors. (It will always reject "fl_shimmers" as wrong, it does not check for the item numbers being in the correct range&&)

In GF2 the Pit of Misfits worker Heust Blade was a good fighter alright. I found that all the creations could not be controlled in combat, which totally outweighed the fact that they didn't cost any essence. They were just more trouble than they were worth, especially in tricky fights. I simply used two creations (Drakons towards the end) and a Shaper.

Back to Battle Shaping in Geneforges 2,3,4:

Battle shaping in Geneforge 2 had a useful Clawbug. But Fire Shaping gave the Drakon, who was a good melee combatant, I usually had him move right up to an opponent and then hit. The magic side, the spit fire attack was good but never did enough damage, except against a few low level enemies. In melee there is the possibility of a high speed giving a second swing.

For the last third of the game I had just a Shaper and the Drakon. (I was really into Strong Daze, knock all enemies out then attack just one.) When in Gazak Uss I backed up the two of them with a Rotghroth. (I have not finished Gazak Uss.)

I found that monsters who join you, as opposed to being created by you, are good but that they can never be controlled. In certain fights that leads to massive headaches, the party needs to pull back and rest but the NPC insists on attacking powerful monsters.

Does anyone actually use a small army? A few high quality creations are all you need. Cannon fodder has trouble hitting those tough high level monsters. The fewer the creations the higher and faster the Shaper gains levels.

In Geneforge 3 and 4 I have played only bits of the beginning, I found a Fyora to be quite enough. (In 3 I am using the help of Greta.)

A meat shield is quite useful considering that Shapers are weak, especially as the game progresses and the monsters get to have many more hp than the Shaper.

"Hard coded" means hard coded into the open source Editor. Soon you will be able to customize every feature of the Editor, if you have a compiler. (You can get free compilers.) Even the new Niemand editor is open source or will soon be.

Definitely other scenarios had special spells, the Exodus scenario had the best - developed system to date.

Any of the Geneforge games would be easy to convert to a Blades of Geneforge. Like Blades of Avernum and Avernum 4, (and unlike Avernums 1, 2 and 3) they have a core program and a whole lot of scripts. The GF# Scendata.dat is much like the Bas file in a BoA scenario.

As I have mentioned earlier, I am sure that Jeff Vogel already has his own personal editor for each of the Geneforge games. So creating a Blades of Geneforge is an easy job for even a busy JV. You might want the ability to port BoA scenarios, that would be a fun job.

As for the effort involved, it is no problem if you really want to have a BoA Geneforge scenario.

You won't have to come up with a BoA - style spell screen/toolbar. I mean Kelandon showed how custom spells could work in Exodus.

I don't recall any limitations as to what type of creature NPCs must be. Usually they are human but the game views them as Character ID numbers.

The Louvre has a lot of Geneforge graphics for BoA, four separate sheets of Outdoor Terrain from Geneforge. Then there are seven sheets of Geneforge items, along with graphics for individual monsters.

The mechanics are fairly straightforward:

Special Geneforge (or Nethergate) skills can be handled as Stuff Done Flags. The call change_pc_skill_pts can enable BoA skill points to be converted into values for SDFs, into skill points for "Geneforge/Nethergate skills", via the Increment Flag call.

(Edit: this is not such a bright idea if the party will be going from one scenario to another. Especially if some of the scenarios are Geneforge and some not. A better idea is to have a second set of "skill points" for "Geneforge skills", both the skill points and the skills will be represented by SDFs.)

The means to do this can be given to trainers or to a Special Ability

With 9000 SDFs there will be plenty of room for special skills and spells. In Geneforge 4 there are 19 skills, 15 types of monster shaping and 40 spells. Actually selling these things will probably require dialog nodes, one text response per skill/spell. By contrast, gaining these skills by canisters will be quite straightforward.

Actually viewing the Geneforge skills will be a bit tougher and may require a lot of use of print big str or the use of a dialog box. In the latter case, the punctuation and layout won’t be optimum.

As for Blades of Geneforge, there may already be such a program. Glancing through the Data folder of Geneforge 2 I noticed a whole lot of small icons with numbers like 1600&. They struck me as looking like icons for a hypothetical Geneforge 3D Editor. (I would not be surprised if Jeff Vogel uses something like that to create the Geneforge games.)

In theory you could create BoA scenarios which are based upon the Geneforge world but it would take some doing: disabling all existing spells, creating new skills&&. Distributing skill points to the custom skills after gaining levels would be a problem.

A Blades of Nethergate would be an interesting idea. Once again, creating a Nethergate - based BoA scenario would be quite a problem.

Yes the list of fixes would be useful for porting, also people can try out any pet ideas and see if anything comes of them.

If anyone could post a list of the tweaks needed to get the 3D source code to compile that would be handy. The average user of the BoA Editor would not have that knowledge, unless they already knew a lot about programming.

Currently the same list of item shortcuts does apply to all towns. However, if the Editor is being recompiled from scratch it becomes possible to have such a list for every town. If we are redesigning the Editor what we say goes, it is no longer a case of what the original designers decreed. You might need to save the list of shortcuts in a separate (external) save file. Such a file is really only needed by the designer of the scenario anyway. It need not be large, there are currently 10 shortcuts, each of which lists 10 items. 300 or 400 Bytes per town.

Edit Item Placement Shortcuts in the Scenario menu allows you to decide the percentage chance of each item occurring in a given type of terrain. This is what the Add Random items command in the Town menu actually executes. That is why the latter is so set - piece, the choosing actually takes place elsewhere.

A good idea is to shift the Edit Item Placement Shortcuts command to the Town menu, just above the Add Random Items command.

Niemand, have you actually tried to compile the 3D source code on Dev-C++? I did and got 11 major errors, hence there was nothing compiled.

Here I did a three - way check: comparing the BoE Editor Help file with the Bl A Fileio.c source file and the BoA Editor documentation.

I have not finished work on the list of routines that are apparently not correctly translated. As I recall there were a few problems with horses and boats&. Then certain calls had the wrong number of arguments&&. Then there were a few punctuation problems. The list is at home.

As for compiling the 3D Editor, I will have to download the latest version and see what happens. I tried it on last year's version of Dev-C++ and couldn't compile anything at all. This was using the 3D source as downloaded, there were no modifications of mine that I recall.

The import function really needs to be customized for each individual scenario. Currently it is based upon a plain vanilla default scenario with no custom terrain, items or monsters. If Niemand can create a Windows 3D Editor that can be compiled on common IDEs then porting should really take off.

Even now you can customize the translations with discrete hex editing.

A lot of the special node translation routines are not accurate representations of what the BoE Editor help file says about the nodes. Here customization can really help.

That restriction on movement is a good idea too. Otherwise your low - level party could blunder into something too big to handle. So the game needs a pacing mechanism which ensures that the party does not have the ability to explore areas where the monsters are just too tough.

The flip side is that the game is more linear than its predecessors. In Avernum 1 you could make a bee - line for Erika's Tower quite easily. This could lead to big trouble.