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Celtic Minstrel

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Posts posted by Celtic Minstrel

  1. BoE has those portal nodes where only one PC gets to go through, right? It might be messy, but is there a way to enter one of those at the start and just never reunite with the party? (Not sure how that works with town changes.)

    It doesn't work very well; if you exit town and re-enter, the items of the missing PCs are dropped. As far as I know, reuniting would still work in that case, though; they just would no longer have their stuff.

     

    (which if i remember correctly dust status you cannot be ressurected?)

    You can resurrect from dust status. It just requires a higher-level spell.

     

    Ennui Im glad to atleast hear that it can be possible to make it work, for me I'd rather FORCE them to play with 1 PC at a time, It just feels better to me that they HAVE to rather then choosing not to and ruining my whole experience for the player.

    This is literally impossible within the BoE engine and always has been, thanks to the existence of the character editor.

     

    The all mighty doer of stuff, Im not getting what your saying. I just checked the character editor with a loaded party or not and I dont see how you can "add" party members after there past the node or even before it.

     

    1. If a character died, or if you used the Split Party node, the character editor can bring back the missing party members.
    2. It is possible to add new PCs after the game begins, without using the character editor, but as I recall, you need to be in the town you started in; so you can easily get around that by making the startup town a "setup" town that removes 5 party members and then takes you to a different town.

     

    I also note that the original Blades of Exile clearly leaned more towards giving the designer control than you guys are, as the removal of the scenario password and Shift-D restriction you mention demonstrates.

    That isn't really relevant here, given that the scenario password never restricted use of the character editor, only the scenario editor.

     

     

    Long story short, Remington - you need to design under the assumption that the character editor does not exist. There is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent people from using the character editor (or saved games in general), so there's no point in even trying. There's nothing wrong with trying to force the player to use only one PC, though. If they take the effort get around it, that's their fault for ignoring your instructions. You've said that most people will cheat, but to be honest, I don't think that's the case unless cheating is easier than just playing the game. In this case, cheating means:

     

    1. Save your game.
    2. Open your saved game in the character editor, make changes, save results.
    3. Return to game, reopen your saved game.

     

    I don't see how you could call that easier than just continuing to play with a single character, as you want them to.

  2. Presumably you're working on original BoE so this doesn't apply, but pretty much everything you mentioned is theoretically not a problem in OBoE. This doesn't help you right now, since OBoE is unstable and unplayable, but from the sounds of it you're going to be taking quite a long time with other aspects of your design, so perhaps OBoE will be usable by the time you get to wanting some of its new capabilities.

     

    To answer your questions (unless otherwise noted, these answers only apply to OBoE):

    1. It's possibly to make NPC that will join the party as a full party member - in effect, transforming an NPC into a PC. There's no way in either version of BoE to force a player to start with only one character though, short of deleting (or, in OBoE, storing) all but one when the scenario starts.
    2. There is absolutely no way in either version of BoE to give the player penalties for full party death. I believe there already exist penalties for PC death, though. I have no intention of ever adding anything that would subvert the ability to load the game where you left off. Personally, I think you shouldn't be concerned about this. Save-scumming is boring usually, but if someone's so dedicated that they can be bothered to do it, then I see no reason to stop them.
    3. There is a new way to affect fog of war in OBoE, if I recall correctly. If there isn't, it would be trivial to add.
    4. This is really just a matter of opinion, really. It's easy to prevent outdoor battles either by not setting up the wandering encounters or by not ever allowing the party to leave town. Personally, I think a few outdoor battles makes a vast outdoors more interesting, though. They don't necessarily need to be random ones - if you dislike wandering encounters, you could just use the fixed outdoor battle encounters.
    5. These limits are pretty much all removed in OBoE. You can have effectively unlimited amounts of terrains, items, etc. For pre-OBoE though, it has been common practice to turn furniture into items (rather than terrains), which would save a fair amount of terrain slots. Of course, item slots are the most limited, so whether that's a good idea really depends.

  3. —Alorael, who supposes one could also download the Windows version, copy the graphics over the newer graphics in a Mac installation, and then feel successful without having to resort to having or emulating window.

    This would probably be very difficult, given how the graphics are represented in the Mac version of Exile 1. (I think Exile 2 would be slightly easier.) First of all, both Exile 1 and Exile 2 store their graphics in the resource fork, so you'd need a resource editor... if you're able to play the Mac version, you can probably also run ResEdit, though. Secondly, Exile 1 doesn't really use tilesheets to the same extent as the Windows version - many of the graphics are split up with one tile per resource, and furthermore, if I recall correctly, even those that are on a tilesheet are not necessarily arranged the same as in the Windows tilesheets.

     

    It's probably easier to just set up a Windows 3.x install in DOSBox and use the Windows versions directly, as I have.

  4. Well, I doubt he'll ever release the source to the original trilogy, but he did release the source to Blades of Exile, so it would in principle be possible to remake the Exile trilogy on that engine. I'm not recommending it, mind you (in particular, permission would be needed!), but it is roughly the same engine as E3.

     

    (Of course, BoE also needs to be stable before you can do anything like that with it...)

  5. I've fixed two of those if I recall correctly - the Advanced section in the Scenario menu, and the Mage Lore training issue.

     

    In addition to the missing boats, it seems that there are missing items in some scenarios, for example in the first storeroom in Valley of Dying things. I'm not sure what to make of these issues... but I suppose I will have to investigate soon since they essentially make the game unplayable.

  6. Well, that error definitely indicates it's not linking against zlib - the gzclose() function is defined in the zlib .lib/.dll, so if it was linking against it, it would've resolved the symbol. I'm not sure why it wouldn't be linking against it though... sorry...

  7. That's certainly one way in which BoE was better, as it allowed you to place your summons when in combat. (When summoning from town mode they would still appear randomly, though.) I'm guessing the issue here for BoA is that the engine has no way to target an empty space... which I guess is also why spells like Unlock and Move Mountains(?) were changed to radius spells.

  8. I'm a little baffled by a moment in the most recent episode. You tried Divine Retribution on the eyebeasts. You determined that they were immune to it. You then tried Arcane Blow — which does the same type of damage as Divine Retribution. Seeing that they were immune to that, you then tried Lightning Spray — which again does the same type of damage! If something's immune to one of those spells, it will be immune to all of those spells. It would be like trying Bolt of Fire and then Divine Fire and then Fireblast — they're all fire, so an immunity to fire makes something immune to all of those.

    I don't think that's quite the same situation. Bolt of Fire, Divine Fire, and Fireblast very obviously deal the same type of damage. Divine Retribution, Arcane Blow, and Lightning Spray do not obviously deal the same type of damage. In fact, while I could understand expecting the first two to do the same type of damage (magic damage), it would be quite reasonable to expect Lightning Spray to deal a different type of damage (electricity).

     

    Basically, the fact that those three spells deal the same type of damage just isn't as obvious as it is with the three fire spells, so it shouldn't be so surprising to see someone trying all three on the same monster.

  9. I don't remember exactly how long Melliput Mobsters is, but I know it's short. If I recall correctly, you basically go through three dungeons. Whether that takes more than 2 hours as Tarsus suggests though, I can't remember.

     

    I think there were also one or two unfinished but non-essential features in the main town, including the ability to play a card game and something about a hotel. So you may want to avoid those, or at least save before trying them in case something goes wrong.

     

    Someday I'll probably come back to it and finish them. Probably. We can hope.

  10. I just want to point out that "current HP or SP" is not really a stat, if you define stats as the things you can put skill points into.

     

    I hadn't thought of using some other skill in place of Str/Dex in the calculations... hmm...

     

    Cleave as an item ability might be doable, sure. I'll put that on the list. (It might be doable with the "call special on hit" ability, but such items can't be carried between scenarios, so even if it's possible it'd be nicer to have it as a dedicated ability.)

     

    The specific help page on items is here if you haven't found it already.

  11. True, that possibility does exist. However, there were some that clearly didn't make sense, such as petrification touch on the cockroaches. This was almost certainly caused by a reshuffling of which magic number meant what, while failing to update bladbase references to it.

  12. Interesting! I never would've guessed they'd summon ghasts... actually given their paralysis touch it kinda surprises me that they'd maybe have another ability too.

     

    As long as you're investigating E3 stuff, I'd like to confirm the abilities of some of the monsters I've never encountered - particularly rakshasa and naga, where it's not obvious from the name what kind of abilities they should have. (I've also never encountered the golems or the efreet, but those are fairly clear, I think.) I also wanted to confirm whether the alien slime is supposed to have an ability besides summoning (I think it has paralysis touch in BoE), but given that that's near the beginning, I could probably do it myself with a god party. That's all I can think of right now.

  13. As for your specific requests, I'm pretty sure I had Prazac's Quest and The Duel at some point, and some others sound loosely familiar (Excalibur, Hidden Valley).

    Well, I'll look at it this evening when I'm back home. I might as well post the whole list of scenarios I have, just to be sure.

    I also noticed one called Burano on the TrueSite archive of your old website, but all the scenario links there are broken, so it can't be downloaded. ADoS had never heard of it, so I guess that means it's also lost, unless you have it. (Or unless it also has an alternate name.)

     

     

    OBoE actually prefers PNG but reads BMP, GIF, and MEG as well now, independent of OS, so don't worry about the graphics.

    Well, I'd love it if this were the case, but actually the game can only load MEG files on the Mac, and even then not very well. It doesn't load GIF or PNG files for legacy scenarios. The Mac version does load BMPs, but if you have a MEG, it would be preferable to get both types. If you don't have a MEG, don't worry; the BMP can be used just fine. If you have a MEG and not a BMP, I should be able to convert it for you, so that's not really an issue either.
  14. Blades of Exile is written in C/C++, so Java isn't really very useful to the project. If you're willing to learn C++ though, you could help; in many ways the syntax is similar to Java, though in many ways it's also very different. Take a look at the code if you think you might be interested.

     

     

  15. edit: fyi there's a couple small things in your site, here's a patch of recommendations

    Thanks for the suggestions!

     

    - at some point i'm going to rewrite l.calref, and the custom shortcuts are prolly gonna go since i'm literally the only person who has ever used them. plus it's kinda funky having a link shortener when you don't need one, why did we have one again? (if you want to keep it, that's fine, but make sure to change it to an https url)

    That shortened URL has been in the IRC channel topic for quite awhile. There's a limit on topic length (though at the moment I don't think we're near the limit), so having a shorter URL is handy.
  16. I wouldn't say the MEGs are no longer useful. Sometimes the MEG may have darker graphics than the BMP does, so if anything it'd be preferable to keep the MEG and throw out the BMP (though that has its own problems since the Windows build can't load MEGs). If the MEG and BMP have exactly the same graphics, mind you, it's not worth keeping the MEG now.

     

    If you let me know which ones have MEGs, I can check if they're darker than the corresponding BMPs.

  17. I took a look at the damaged zips you have stored on openboe.com (you have The Doomed Land in with them even though it seems to be perfectly fine, by the way). I was able to extract the custom graphics from all of them, and other files such as readmes in some cases, but not the actual scenario for the most part. The archives seem to have been truncated.

     

    I did manage to extract and load scenario files for Kistar's Quest, Fort Emerald Robbery, and Signs and Portents, but I'm pretty sure they're incomplete. They have 7, 13, and 2 towns, respectively. In other words, some of the towns seem to be missing.

     

    EDIT: Signs and Portents and Fort Emerald Robbery are both available on TrueSite – not in the scenario archive but in the GeoCities archive on Alcritas's and BainIhrno's sites respectively. Foreshadows can still be found on *i's site which is linked from the scenario download page on TrueSite.

     

    So at least the two major draws you mentioned are not lost.

  18. However, I would be willing to offer ideas/suggestions and do some programming. I'm lousy at C++ (never mind the functional C++11/14 stuff) but should be able to manage something useful.

    Well, feel free to head over to the Blades of Exile forum (or the IRC channel) and offer your ideas and suggestions. If you want to help a little with the C++ work, you could take a look at the source code repository on GitHub.

     

    Might be better writing documentation though. (Am familiar with that from my time in sysadmin jobs.)

    I think the documentation is fairly good now, but I'm sure it still has room for improvement. The documentation is also in the source code repository, in HTML format, so you can take a look at it there. Sylae also has a copy up on her site, though I'm not entirely sure if that's kept regularly up-to-date.

     

    I can program C++ (though I wouldn't say I'm the most experienced), I have a good understanding of the games inner mechanics and balance. I do have some suggestions such as fixing certain broken skills, though I'm not sure if you are willing to make such changes.

    The chance that I'll do it is a lot lower if you don't tell me than if you do, so please do give those suggestions!

     

     

     

    By the way, in addition to the Blades of Exile forum, you can report bugs and offer suggestions right on GitHub. It may help prevent them from getting lost.

  19. A great many of the new graphics on that sheet were made by Luz Piazuelo; they were on Pixel Profusion, and we got permission to use them. Some of her graphics were indisputably in the Windows brightness; I fixed those ones up to match the Mac brightness instead (in fact I did that to several of her graphics that didn't end up being included - you can see all of them here.) Most of the rest of the new ones were done by ADoS, with several by Mistb0rn (back in 2009, the last time I put out a call for new graphics) and a few by me. There are a few made by Milu or Shyguy which are pending permission and thus may be removed. The christmas tree is also likely to be removed, and that hatch on blue cave floor in the bottom row is going to be removed too. There are a couple of other miscellanous ones that aren't 100% set in stone as well (even some of Luz's).

     

    Rehashes of BoE stuff can be accepted if they actually look good, but if you can do a good job from scratch, that's probably preferable. I also have a script which usually does a pretty decent job of separating terrain objects from their background while preserving the shadow and any other shading, which was a great help.

     

    If you think some of them look a bit odd, I wouldn't mind knowing which ones. If you can explain why, even better.

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