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Celtic Minstrel

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Posts posted by Celtic Minstrel

  1. The game is "playable" but there seems to be some buffer overrun issues (or something) that prevent quests and events from working correctly in some cases. I'm not sure if these issues can be fixed with the help of asan. It could even be something like the SDF coordinates not being initialized somewhere, so that random SDFs are set to random values or something.

  2. I want to note that, while that version you download probably works, it's not the latest version and in particular not a version I had any part in producing. The latest available version is the most recently-posted download in this thread. It has some bugs and glitches, however, so if all you want to do is play the game, the CBoE version you obtained should be sufficient.

  3. Just a heads-up if you're building the Linux version from HEAD – while HEAD builds, it has some crashes that are fixed by pull request 274, so you'll want to merge that locally as well (something like "git pull origin refs/pull/274/head" should work). It's not merged yet simply because I haven't had a chance to give it a detailed review.

     

    There are still some unimplemented bits in the Linux code, but the game itself pretty much works from what I understand. It might not build on BSDs though (at least one person, possibly two, tried that with no success).

  4. Hmm, okay, seems like there's a second bug there in that node step-through mode isn't properly linked to debug mode. I believe the shortcut to disable it is Shift+1 (probably requires debug mode enabled); alternately, when you see those messages, I think escape will disable them as well (which shouldn't require debug mode enabled).

  5. 1 hour ago, Thaluikhain said:

    But all my maps had been erased, both the outdoors where I was, and the two towns I'd visited.

    Huh, haven't seen that one before… just to clarify, by maps, you mean the areas you've explored on the automap, right?

    1 hour ago, Thaluikhain said:

    Also, went to the blacksmith and bought some stuff, and it's not identified when I got it

    This one should be fixed in the next build.

    1 hour ago, Thaluikhain said:

    There's also a weird thing when I trigger a special, and nothing happens until I click again, which sometimes happens when it's a one time show text thingy.  Annoying but not game killing.

    This almost sounds like it could be related to the debug mode bug, as there's a step-through mode that shows the current node in the transcript and pauses after each node… but it also sounds like it could be something totally different?

    1 hour ago, Thaluikhain said:

    "Save as" is working again, though clicking on "Cancel" still saves, rather than cancels.

    Ugh, really? That's a pretty terrible bug…

    1 hour ago, Thaluikhain said:

    ALSO EDIT:  The "Go back" function in the dialogue doesn't do anything.

    This one is known… Go Back is currently broken.

    1 hour ago, Thaluikhain said:

    ALSO ALSO EDIT:  When casting spells at a target sitting on top of a special, it kept triggering that special.  Which could be useful if you could do that on purpose, now that I think of it.

    Yes, the ability to trigger specials by casting spells is intentional… however, it shouldn't be triggering just any special… so this is still a bug. (Also, the white special spots are supposed to be impassable to monsters.)

     

    EDIT: I opened #267, #268, and #269 based on your post.

  6. 2 hours ago, Thaluikhain said:

    Hmmm, ok, so there's a Vahnatiai option now (have to rethink my usual 2 of each party) with one Vahnatai graphic, an Anama Member option (which everyone who isn't a caster should always take, I guess).

    Well, if you want to have an optimal party, and eliminate the possibility of some characters learning mage spells later on, sure.

     

    2 hours ago, Thaluikhain said:

    Have noticed that the "save as" function inside a scenario is the same as "save", doesn't give you an option to choose where you are saving to.

    …really? Save as was working last time I checked… I'll check again though.

     

    2 hours ago, Thaluikhain said:

    And there's a really annoying flickering thing down the very bottom, the only way I can play the game is to play on small screen and stick the bottom below the edge of my screen.

    Indeed, this is very annoying and I'm still not sure where it comes from. I think I have an idea to "fix" it, though.

     

    2 hours ago, Thaluikhain said:

    The normal screen is a little small and the 2x is too big to fit on my screen.

    While I can't promise it'll look good, it's possible to edit the bladeprefs.ini to set the UISCale to 1.5 (or any other value you want to try)

     

    2 hours ago, Thaluikhain said:

    EDIT:  Ah, found some things.  The controls are a bit sluggish, and I can walk through anything (walls, trees, caves).  Also, ran into an outdoor encounter of goblins and they didn't seem to be able to move or attack, just stood there until I killed them.  Put a PC next to one and "stand ready" -ed and they didn't attack in their turn.

    Other than the sluggish controls, what you're describing is debug mode plus ghost mode. Shift-D will disable it. There was a bug where sometimes they'd spontaneously enable themselves, which will be fixed in the next build.

  7. 20 hours ago, Thaluikhain said:

    Was wondering, was BoE supposed to be full screen only, and the character and scenario editors part screen only, or was that just me?  In any case, thanks.

    Yes, the editors have no fullscreen mode. The game itself can be toggled between windowed and fullscreen mode in the preferences (File menu on Windows/Linux, app menu on Mac).

  8. Another new build can be downloaded here. There are a few bugfixes, but the main difference is that the game will load graphics from the userdata directory in preference to the actual game directory. This could be used to make the UI look like Exile 3, for example, without needing to constantly modify the program directory.

     

    By "userdata" directory, I mean the location where Open Blades of Exile reads (and sometimes, writes) user-specific data. On Windows, this is in %APPDATA%\Blades of Exile. On the Mac, it will be $HOME/Library/Application Support/Blades of Exile, and I believe the Linux location is something like $XDG_CONFIG_DIR/openboe. To make the game load custom graphics, create a "data" directory at this location, and a "graphics" directory within that. (Other directories here will also override default resources, for example "sounds" or "fonts".)

  9. The last part is easy - Exile I and II with updated graphics can be downloaded right from Spiderweb's site.

     

    For running the Exile trilogy in an emulator, I've found it works pretty good in Basilisk II (using the Mac version); for me this works better than DOSBox (using the Windows version). Unfortunately, getting Basilisk II set up is probably even harder than DOSBox+Win3.1…

  10.  

    Thank you for explaining it, probably far better than I could have. :)

     

    56 minutes ago, Ess-Eschas said:

    People will have written scenarios and not released them – I can say that in confidence, for I have done so myself.

    Indeed, I too have one or two unreleased legacy scenarios that I might wish to someday polish up and release. (Plus one OBoE scenario that I started to show off some of the new features.)

  11. Such a node is possible, certainly, but rather than editing legacy scenarios to add this node, it would need to be set so that the default (at least for legacy scenarios) is the original 9x9 view. We can't add any features that require actively changing a legacy scenario, because there could be legacy scenarios out there that none of us know about (for example, ones that were never released), and such scenarios need to work just as well as the ones we do know about.

  12. After a long silence, I have finally produced a new build! Windows users can download it here. I am still unable to produce a Mac build that will run on modern Macs, but if someone else provides one, I'll mirror it on my site.

     

    This version has quite a few performance and stability improvements. There is a change to the save file format as well. I believe older saves should still load, but I can't guarantee they'll be playable.

     

    In addition, the Linux version of the game is finally usable. It now has a custom-built menubar, allowing Linux users to use alchemy, create new characters on the fly, access the journal, and so on… as well as using the editors. The Linux menubar is thanks to another contributor who goes only by "xq". I don't know if they have a forums account.

  13. I've reported this issue to ADoS, so hopefully it can get fixed within 24 hours or so. It can also be downloaded from GitHub if you need it now, but that'll give you the entire source code (I don't think GitHub offers a way to only download the doc subdirectory).

  14. I still have a copy of the original game around and a working resource editor! The spider is PICT resource ID 968 in the Mac version. I don't believe the slith is present in the Mac version at all (at least I couldn't find it anywhere). Both are on sheet MONST2 in the Windows version.

  15. Using the targeting system for "all within radius" spells is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how much work it would be to implement. Perhaps I could do it without too much effort by telling the targeting system to use a range of 1 or 0 or something like that… though that would mean you have to click right on the caster in order to cast it, which might be pretty weird.

     

    Adding a count to the look function, on the other hand, would probably be pretty easy.

  16. I'm pretty sure the palette used in Blades of Exile was basically the standard 8-bit colour palette used on the Apple Macintosh? As for Windows, I'd guess probably 8-bit VGA. I'm not sure what differences there might be between the two, but perhaps that's the reason why the graphics were always different on Mac vs Windows.

     

    In short, as far as I know, it's not using a super-restricted palette – it's using the best it could at the time. Of course, it's always possible that the artist imposed additional restrictions on their work, but I would have no way of knowing of those…

     

    Some things to keep in mind:

     

    • I recommend downloading the Exile series (excepting maybe BoE) directly from Spiderweb's website rather than from MyAbandonware – it's an official freeware release. It might be the same as what MyAbandonware has, but I can't be certain.
    • If you're just interested in making scenarios, then there's no need to worry about palettes – the updated Blades of Exile (links in the forum header) supports full 24-bit colour.
    • If your goal is to list every colour used in the original graphics, be sure to use the download from the Spiderweb Software site and not any of the updated downloads, as the colours might have been subtly changed by accident at some point.

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