Celtic Minstrel

Ishad Nha: First of all, your buffer is not initialized to zeroes (only variables declared outside a function get that treatment); instead, it's not initialized at all and thus starts out as garbage data. (Also, why are you including <iostream> when you don't even use it?) Secondly, I wonder if it might be more convenient for you to parse the XML format that the latest Blades of Exile releases can produce? You'd just have to resave it as a .boes in the new scenario editor, change the file extension to .tgz (or .tar.gz), and unpack it with 7zip (which would produce a folder called "scenario" - not the scenario's name, just "scenario"). Just a thought. (It's also somewhat human-readable.) Barring one or two issues I fixed recently (like changing "One-Time Do Nothing" nodes to "One-Time And Set"), the conversion seems to be pretty accurate now. (And I'd love to have someone point out any places where it's not accurate.)

From the code I can't see why this would happen, so it's possible I already fixed it. If you happen to remember a specific place where the "buy response, set flag" node is used, that would help me to verify.(I'm assuming you mean the talking node here.) These two are probably fixed by the overhaul to save files in the latest version (which apparently you can't run) - they're data not being cleared correctly when a saved game is loaded, but in the latest version, I no longer just reuse the existing "universe" and overwrite the data that was saved; instead I construct a new default universe (which would have no "item taken" flags and no Soul Crystal monsters) and then fill it with what's in the save file. As such, I'd like to resolve the issue that makes the latest version unusable for you before trying to pursue something that, in all likelihood, is no longer a problem.

Uhh, okay, this is weird. The generic lever dialog is defined by the file data/dialogs/basic-lever.xml, which quite clearly states to use terrain graphic #13. I can't imagine why that would be - the lever terrain is #264, and the lever dialog pic is #9. The question is: Should I change it to use dialog graphic #9, or the lever terrain graphic (#264 or #265)? EDIT: For now I've gone with the former. It can always be changed later if people complain loudly enough.

Blargh! Do you get an error message or crash report? And for the ending issue, your saved game would probably be helpful. So anyway, I haven't made much progress, but I did fix the issue with special nodes - when importing a legacy scenario, the code was converting all "One-Time Do Nothing" nodes to "One-Time And Set" due to a missing break.

I thought it was more of a comedy...

I'm here! I may or may not play a new scenario though (depending on factors like whether it seems interesting, how long/large it is, and whether I feel like I have time to spare).

#2 is easy to fix. I'll try to reproduce #1 as well, but it would be helpful if you can figure out something in common with the times it doesn't work. (Just to be sure, did you update to the latest build?)

So, it looks like the parse error you got is fairly simple to fix in the engine (quick-fix for you would be to add something like <item chance="1">1</item> in the storage tag, I think). It's a matter of save and load disagreeing on whether you can have a storage shortcut with no items. I'm wondering though, couldn't you have posted the full error message like so?

As far as I know, no-one is really playing (or at least, anyone who is hasn't said anything) other than you and possibly ADoS. If you count the original, stable game, there might be a few others (I know one or two people on the forum didn't get the upgraded BoE mainly because it wasn't stable). If I ever finish any of my scenarios, I wonder if anyone will even play them. I'll probably work on them anyway though. Eventually. (I especially want to finish the two-town one that uses a lot of the new features.)

Already addressed these. They were about as easy as I predicted - simple minor logic errors (in fact, I'd say all but the last were probably typos). I'll probably look at the opening stone / One-Shot issue(s) tomorrow.

This won't address any of the things you just posted, but... I have put up a new build for both Mac and Windows. Uhh... not as far as I know? I suppose you could pastebin the file's contents (though pastebin is normally meant for partial stuff). You could also email me the file (no idea if you have my email though). (Actually, since you're a mod, maybe you have attachment priveleges? You could check the full posting page just in case.) These all seem like relatively easy things to fix (the first is probably just a typo). I'll work on them as soon as possible. (Hopefully the won't turn out to be harder than anticipated.) This should probably be fixed in the engine rather than in the scenario. Is it possible to get a list of particular cases you had problems with? Hmm, something to think about fixing in the bladbase as well, once I get around to converting it to .boes. Actually, once all the scenarios are converted to .boes, I plan to apply all bladbase fixes (and possibly ADoS's descriptions) to all four of them.

If a storage tag is being referenced by the error, that could still mean quite a few things... a storage tag is only allowed inside the editor tag (though I doubt that would be the problem), and its children have specific types - most of the values need to be an integer, but is-property should be a boolean (ie, "true" or "false", without the quotes). The chance attribute on the item tag is also an integer. I'd be kinda surprised to see BoE writing invalid data, though... and did you even edit the item placement shortcuts? Is BoE giving nothing more than just "parse error"? If there's more that's a pain to copy down, you can use the Copy button in the error dialog to copy the full text to the clipboard, and if that still doesn't help, I guess you could send the scenario.xml for me to have a look?

I just don't like that sort of arbitrary thing. But I guess it's not a real problem, no. And I've actually made the scenario editor note in the monster editing dialog which spells can summon it, so it's less of a problem than it was. (This feature accounts both for the hard-coded spells and for the generic summon spells based on summon category.)

I personally prefer the mechanic of retrievable arrows (with some exceptions - eg, exploding arrows should not be retrievable), though I certainly won't be implementing this in BoE.

I sort of want to fix this so that the monsters summoned by the spells are hard-coded into the engine (though still allowing a scenario to intentionally override them somehow). I might never get around to it though. I don't remember whether it was archery or thrown missiles, but it was indeed fixed. However I have no intention of making a legacy check to preserve balance in original-BoE scenarios.

Doesn't it mention a filename or any additional details? As long as there's a filename mentioned, you could theoretically fix it by opening the scenario with an unarchiver program. Or if it's an error in the dialog itself, it could theoretically be fixed by editing its XML definition in data/dialogs. I can't really help just from a line number, though.

Yes, that's intended. See the edit to my previous post. (It also recurses into subdirectories when looking for scenarios.)

If you edit Valley of Dying things and save it, you'll need to use the "Custom Scenario" button to run the edited version. Eventually (hopefully soon) the main "Start Scenario" will reference .boes instead of .exs, but I'm not quite confident yet in the losslessness of the conversion. Also, custom scenarios are read from ~/Library/Application Support/Blades of Exile/Scenarios (for Mac), not from the Scenarios folder in the game directory.

Wasn't archery being useless a bug, though? If so, that should be fixed in OBoE and archery should no longer be totally useless. I think what you've missed here is that this applies to OBoE and not the original game. Yeah, I found this restriction annoying and have done quite a bit of work to remove it. It's not accurate that the summoned creatures are stored directly in the item, but they're included in party data somewhere. It may still be a little buggy. There are still items that can't be carried between scenarios, mind you. Mainly ones that call a special node (which is also a new possibility that I added). There are several "item abilities" that make it call a special node in various contexts, such as when you strike a monster with it, when you drop it on the ground, when you equip it, when you use it, etc (can't recall if I did all of those, but most of them).

There have not yet been any changes to the original scenarios, so if something isn't working, it's either an original bug in the scenario or a bug in the engine.

I get the impression that saved games are far more broken than I'd thought... and apparently you can't learn new spells for some reason... I'll look into these issues as soon as possible.

I'm a bit confused - are you saying it doesn't work at all (ie, the player can learn/cast mage spells), or that it simply isn't shown? I remember fixing this awhile ago, but I guess it broke again. Sigh. Wait, does this mean that "Save As" correctly saves all your data? For example, not mysteriously losing spells you learned, or auto-healing you on load, or anything like that.

Given that this is "Blades of Exile", I don't really see how it's a problem for the descriptions to be "very Exiley".

That's great to hear, as it supports my testing on the matter. The issue seems to have been a problem of uninitialized variables with garbage data. If you're able to compile yourself, you can pull from master whenever you want. Otherwise I'll have another build up eventually. After I fix saved games, probably. I'll make sure to make both Windows and Mac builds from now on. For the most part, those are original sound files from the Windows version, so if they were ever directly converted from the Mac 'snd ' resources, only Jeff would know how that was done. I did write a Python script that was able to convert most of the Mac sounds to WAV, but only a few sounds were actually re-extracted with it. (Actually I extracted most of them, and the script didn't work for a few of them as I recall, but most of them didn't seem to have any reduced quality relative to the WAV version, so I didn't commit them.) The original sounds are still in the repo here, if you want to compare for yourself. You'll need a resource editor, of course. (But it's a data-fork resource file, so no need to worry about the fact that it's stored on a non-HFS+ filesystem.) I'd love to use Jeff's descriptions, and I suspect ADoS would too (even though he wrote some of his own), but permission would be needed from him to do so. I do have the strings though, so I could send them to you. I'll get on that at some point.

Are you using Mac or Windows? Either way, you should be aware that some things are still broken. For example, saved games seem to not work correctly at the moment. Scenarios should be relatively safe though, since I have a suite of unit tests to ensure their integrity when loading and saving them (though it's not quite complete yet). 1. One of my commits awhile back fixed an issue that rendered the editor unusable, but had a major hit on performance. The reason is that instead of fixing the root cause, I rewrote the relevant code paths to avoid the issue. I haven't been able to figure out how to fix it properly yet, but it's something I'd like to do. I'm guessing this is what makes it slow, though I can't be sure. 2. Thanks for the report - I was unaware that the Outdoor Details dialog was broken. That looks like it should be easy to fix, so I'll probably have it done in a few minutes (though it could be awhile longer before I get around to making a fixed build, since there's one or two saved game bugs I want to resolve first). 3. There is documentation on Sylae's site, which I believe is linked in the forum header. I'm not sure when that was last updated, but I don't think there were any major changes recent enough to be missed from it. The documentation can also be found in the repository under docs/. It's mostly up-to-date on new features. 4. I have E3 and am able to extract the item descriptions, though the mapping from descriptions to items may not be entirely straightforward. On a related note, ADoS has also written descriptions for all the items in the bladbase (though I'm not entirely sure I agree with his tastes in all areas). 5. Sounds are now in data/sounds/ in the BoE root directory, as WAV files. A scenario can (at least theoretically) substitute individual sounds by including a file with the exact same name under its internal scenario/sounds/ directory (the scenario is a gzipped tarball). I think the scenario editor even has a dialog to add custom sounds, though it probably doesn't work for replacing default ones. However, that upgrade costs money, as far as I know.