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Everything posted by Celtic Minstrel
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You can easily redirect your clone to point to a fork, if necessary. Unless you get direct push access to the main respository, you would need to have a fork so that you can make any changes available to me. (Both require a github account; if you didn't have a github account you could still submit email patches.) Branches are helpful, allowing you to have multiple proposed changes (ie pull requests) simultaneously, so I'd recommend it. I however work almost entirely on master at the moment.
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What do people think of this proposal? 1. Every item has a description stored with it. This description is shown only when the item is identified. In this description, the sequence %% (or something similar) will be substituted with #2, below. Additionally, if this unique description is an empty string, it will be ignored. 2. Each scenario stores generic descriptions that are shown for unidentified items. These are edited in the same way, through the Description button in the item edit dialog, which will now have two text fields and clarify that one of those descriptions will apply to all items with the same unidentified name. 3. Have a flag in the item which makes it use its unique description even when unidentified (alternatively, a separate description stored with the item). This allows things to have customizes unidentified descriptions even if they have the same unidentified name as something else. With this system, unidentified items may change (or even lose) their description when carried into a different scenario. EDIT: Oh yeah, if the item has no unique description, then maybe the generic one could be copied into it when you leave the scenario.
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Oh, sorry... I meant to ask where the game was telling you to put them in the wrong folder.
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Being hidden wouldn't be a problem if there's a button to open the folder from in-game. (Which there isn't at the moment, but I have thought about adding one. It could replace the How To Order button, or maybe be a button in the scenario selection dialog.) Mind you, I'm not really opposed to moving the scenarios folder to documents or similar, though (but I'd leave prefs and logs there).
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Although I've implemented the ability for E3-style item descriptions, I'm having trouble deciding on some of the details. Currently, the descriptions are always visible, even when the item is unidentified (which appears to have been the case in E3, as well). I personally think this is important, but in some cases it might be nice to have a different description for when the item is identified. Also, ADoS wrote his descriptions in the assumption that they are only visible when identified, and it would be a shame to waste the ones that give away what the item is. Personally, I think it makes more sense for the item descriptions to not depend on whether it's identified (it's not like it looks any different once you know what it does!), but I can kind of get why you might want to change them (particularly for items with a concealed ability, such as the mist globes). I'm not entirely sure of the method, however. Also, I don't think it's really a problem for item descriptions (for unidentified items) to occasionally hint at the fact that an item is magical, or even be specific enough that you can pretty much tell exactly which item you have. (For example, "Shield of Klin" might well have Klin's name engraved into it. This doesn't make identification totally useless, though, as identification reveals specifically what it does... in most cases at least.) Another problem I have with my current implementation is that each item has its own unique description, but in many cases these descriptions are identical for a number of similar items. Using scenario strings (instead of strings stored with the item) is also out of the question, because items can be carried between scenarios. Here are some of the possibilities, in no particular order. Some of them may be mutually exclusive. Create a registry of generic item descriptions in the scenario, which would be used only for unidentified items. The description stored with the item would used when identified, if present. Exactly how the generic item description registry would work is uncertain; I was thinking maybe using the unidentified name of the item as a dictionary key, though. Parse the item descriptions differently depending on whether the item is identified. For example, eliminate passages in square brackets if the item is not identified. Store two separate strings with the item, one for when it's identified and one for when it's not. Leave it as-is, but don't show the description when unidentified. I feel that this defeats the point of a description though, which in my opinion should mainly be a physical description of the item. Leave it as-is and accept that some item descriptions may be a dead giveaway. Leave it as-is and rewrite some of the descriptions of unique items. I'm not totally opposed to this, but some of those descriptions are quite nice, and ADoS wouldn't be happy about losing them. (This is an open-source project, so he may have to get used to the idea that his work may be incrementally overwritten, but ... well, this would require more than just minor tweaks. The affected descriptions would need to be rewritten from scratch. And some of them seem pretty good to me.) ... I get the feeling that I forgot one thing I was going to say here. I'm kinda leaning towards #1 and #2 at the moment (or maybe #1 and #3), but I thought it might be good to get some input as well. Perhaps there are other possibilities I haven't thought of. (For the curious, the current descriptions from ADoS can be read on the repository. Some of them still need improvement, particularly the slith spear and vahnatai items, but many of them are quite good.)
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The different location is intentional, since applications generally don't have write access to their own directory these days. I should correct the note saying where to place it, though; but I don't remember when that happens? How did you get the game to tell you where to place scenarios? Okay, this is pretty bad. Ugh. It's probably fixable by tweaking a few constants in the code, though. Hopefully. I'll look into it.
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I haven't added anything to allow monsters to move through arbitrary walls. There is a way for the player to do so in debug mode, but that's probably not relevant. With the removal of various limits, a solution similar to what you described is likely more viable than it used to be; you could even put the Can't Enter special in the terrain definition (rather than using a ton of placed specials in every town). It's still not a general solution, though; in particular, it won't help the monster pass through doors (they'll just open the door like any other monster). I had nebulous plans for letting individual monsters specify which types of terrain they can move through (for example, to allow for swimming monsters). This could potentially also allow for ethereal monsters. However, I haven't given much thought to this, so it's unlikely to be implemented for awhile. (Probably not in time for 2.0.) If I recall correctly, you can use a node to teleport a monster through a wall with the latest OBoE, making a solution similar to what Balladeer solved more viable, since current hp and status effects will be preserved by teleport. If I do not recall correctly, it probably wouldn't be very hard to implement teleportation of monsters. It's also possible to make a monster call a special node as part of its turn.
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Ir: That's definitely a missing zlib, then. I've fixed the three issues you've mentioned, by the way. Jewels: I suspect git is included in the command-line tools that can be installed from XCode preferences (at least, that's how they used to be installed, I don't know if that's still the case). It doesn't matter which folder you clone into. (Generally, cloning automatically creates a folder whose name matches the repository.)
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Did you install zlib? That file is the only one that directly references zlib, so if you were missing zlib I would definitely expect errors in that file. I'd have to see the specific unresolved references to know for sure whether or not it's zlib, though. I've reproduced the second of those errors and am guessing it shouldn't be too difficult to fix. Hopefully I'll be able to reproduce the first one too.
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Just for the record, anyone interested in contributing (especially to programming) may want to post in the Blades of Exile forum (on this site) so that we know who you are. I can see there's at least one person who said they'd like to contribute to programming without saying who they are.
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Are you sure the Text Dump feature doesn't work? They're saved in the same directory as the scenario file, not in the executable directory (as they used to be, if I recall correctly).
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You could point it to my VPS if you want (23.226.229.74)... though if we expect high traffic I'd want to tweak some apache settings... Alternatively, you could put up a website via your own hosting service.
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I could include this in the header of the directory listing for /oboe/. Making a page separate from the directory listing is also a possibility, of course. I'm not sure if that'll make it easily googlable though...
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ADoS: That looks like an improvement, but I think some additional links would be good - the repository (https://github.com/calref/cboe) and possibly also the issue tracker (https://github.com/calref/cboe/issues). Unfortunately you need a github account to start new issues though. There are ways around that, but I haven't set them up yet. EDIT: Also, should we maybe retain the link to the old Win16 / MacOS9 version on Spiderweb's site?
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Well, the C stands for "Classic", though I'm not 100% sure whether "Classic" is supposed to refer to an original untouched version or the updated version. For my part I've always used BoE or OBoE, where the O stands for "open". I guess "original Blades of Exile" would refer to the versions still downloadable on Spiderweb's site. The only obvious modern versions to use are the various snapshots I've uploaded to my VPS, most of which are for Windows (which is only because I hadn't been getting any feedback from Mac users). None of those are entirely stable, though I think they're somewhat playable. I guess I should make another Mac build soon though; I think I might've fixed the skill training problem awhile back. The first of those also may not exist anymore, though if Ormus's build still works, then I guess that would suffice for Windows users. (ADoS couldn't run it, but he was using WINE on Linux, so that might've been the problem.) The second of those isn't especially polished and stable. While you may kinda have a point on the IF implications, "adventures" nevertheless seems like an accurate description of what a scenario is. I also agree that "software suite" is a bit of an odd choice of words.
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It's written in C++.
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I don't know what happened to him. I ended up basing my work on Khoth's Carbon port rather than Chokboyz's Win32 port (since I was working only on the Mac at the time), though I did cherry-pick some of Chokboyz's code. His email is probably around somewhere, so I guess I could try contacting him. Hopefully he's still using the same email. (I also cherry-picked some of Stareye's code, but I don't suppose there's much chance he'd become interested again?)
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I wish there were three or four programmers working on this, not just one more. Ideally, people on different platforms would be great, as I can really only test on Windows 7 (I have a Mac too, but it's so outdated now that I'm not sure if I can call it a decent test). Linux users would be great too; there's already a fork which compiles on Linux, but it's not quite fully functional yet. (From what I've heard, the game is playable on Linux, but the menubar is missing. Thus, the two editor programs would be unusable.) ADoS has certainly been quite helpful in discovering bugs (along with a couple others), and as mentioned he also drew some new sprite art for the game - new status effects, new terrains, some UI art such as cursors and the scenario editor toolbar. Luz has also given permission to bundle some of her BoE artwork with the game, though I haven't gotten around to doing so yet. Still, no amount of new art is helpful if the game won't run, or crashes, or malfunctions, and furthermore it's very hard for me to fix a crash that I can't even reproduce on my own computer (which covers a number of ADoS's more recent reports). I haven't been working on BoE at all recently, for various reasons, but perhaps part of it is the fact that all the work is on me. I won't let it die - I'll certainly get back to it eventually (like last time when I disappeared from BoE dev for years). Having more programmers to help out, though, might motivate me to help them out and work on it sooner. Given actual work, I seriously believe that BoE could be ready to release within, say, six months or so? Nearly all the grunt work of porting to new libraries has been done. The new scenario and saved game formats are essentially complete, though still potentially subject to tweaks here and there, and my unit tests to verify the integrity of the save/load code are mostly done but could use another pair of eyes to see if I missed anything (and perhaps a few more tests for saved games). Basically, most of what needs to be done now is just fixing bugs. There are a few bigger things I still want to do (like enabling a pref to scale up the game interface in order to account for today's larger resolutions), but they're mainly things that could be put off until after 2.0 if I had to. Much like ADoS already said, I want to keep the basic look and feel of the original game, which means no major GUI updates unless they can be made optional (with a preference). (Erdos for example was in favour of completely rearranging the elements of the game interface.) I want the updated version to be able to load saved games and scenarios from the original game; this is important because there's no reason to expect old scenarios to be updated to the new format, and some scenarios shipped with prefabricated parties. I would like to reach a point where the original Exile trilogy could, in theory, be re-implemented in the Blades of Exile engine. (Note: I have no intention of actually doing that, and if anyone else wanted to, you'd need Jeff's permission. But I want it to be possible.) If the BoE community reignites, I guess that would be nice, but I wouldn't say it's why I'm working on this. I have scenarios lying around that I'd like to finish and maybe finally release to an unsuspecting public, and to do that, I need a working BoE. I'd also like to finally play A Small Rebellion and The Za-Khazi Run; the latter I never completed, and the former I never even started, and while it's possible to get the original BoE to run on modern computers (for example in DOSBox or Windows XP mode), it's a huge pain. Trying some of the other scenarios by various designers could be nice too; maybe finishing the few I started (like the babayaga one and the spheres series). But if I'm the only one working on it, fixing all these bugs is going to take time. Possibly a lot of time. If there's anyone who can program, who can fix bugs and work on the game, please announce yourself, and once announced, please try to stick around for awhile. There have been five or six people who showed up, talked about things, maybe got the game to compile, and then disappeared again. Only two of those actually got anything done; Ultra produced a barely-functional linux port while Erdos managed to fix a few bugs (if I recall correctly) and also contributed brand-new file and application icons. In order to get BoE released in a timely manner, I really need more programmers helping. Myself, Erdos, ADoS and Bain-Ihrno simply aren't enough.
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I did change the save format slightly, though it's not difficult to convert interim saves - you just need to strip off the first 10 bytes of the file. And this has nothing to do with ancient saves, which should still load. I'm afraid it's been awhile since I looked at Blades of Exile, so I can't give an ETA on when these bugs will be fixed. Hopefully sooner rather than later though.
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Since you were wondering, I think you can usually resurrect by visiting a healer in town.
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Aren't arrows reusable in Avernum? Or at least have a chance of being retrievable. That's one improvement I recall compared to the Exile trilogy. I tend to forget to use consumables too (wands, potions, scrolls), but arrows and throwing weapons don't seem to fall into that category quite so much, at least if I have someone who has no magic skills. (If they have magic I'd just use a spell instead. Unless they're out of mana.) Still, I can definitely understand your reasoning.
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Speaking of fighting tactics, I've repeatedly wondered why you keep gathering arrows but never using them. I'm also way behind though, so if you've used them since Marralis then I would have no idea.
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Hehe, in episode 4 you accidentally said "Avadon 3". I wonder if you know that light spells work outdoors at night? Though I suppose it doesn't matter that much.
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I've only watched the first two so far, but I noticed that up to that point you had yet to view your quest list... you even got and completed a quest without ever (apparently) noticing (the rats in Fort Talrus). (It also surprises me that you seem to use your mouse so much, but I guess that might just be personal taste.)
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Oh my, seriously? All player-made scenarios? Even my Melliput Mobsters with its unfinished edges? Mind you, I don't really mind you playing that; the unfinished edges were more of an optional cool thing than anything else. Anyway, I have no idea which BoA scenario is which off the top of my head, so let me hunt up a list of them and get back to you on that. EDIT: Well, from perusing the list in the reviews subforum, the only obvious candidate for skipping would be "Nine variations on point B". I assume that list generally omits utility scenarios. The only relationship I can recall between two BoA scenarios is that Kelandon's "Magic" follows somewhat on his "Exodus". I'll let more knowledgeable people fill you in further.
