Celtic Minstrel

While I can say it's almost certainly (mostly) possible, I have no idea how you'd do it. You could try examining the (known) Blades of Exile legacy save file format (which should be pretty similar) to try and figure out where that would be in the Exile 3 format, then use trial and error to work out the exact location from that approximation. I don't think you can confer a permanent flying effect, though, particularly since it automatically expires whenever you enter a town.

I've pushed all the fixes from your second post to master. Thanks for the help!

On 11/21/2017 at 5:38 PM, Ir the Great said:

(Personally, I disagree with that. While I can understand why you would find that to be best, it is very inconvenient for most people especially considering that OBoE has external dependencies that make it more difficult to build.)

Yeah, it's certainly less convenient to have to build it yourself. It's pretty inconvenient to have to manually release new builds though, too. Especially for platforms other than Windows where I can't even be sure my builds will work.

It's possible in the buggy new version, though I don't think I've released a build yet with that capability (so you'd need to build the game yourself).

I would recommend emailing the original artist if you want to use the BoE graphics, though as ADoS says it's technically not necessary given the GPL on OBoE.

16 hours ago, Ess-Eschas said:

I was a little unclear in what I wrote, though. Those corner tiles I were referring to weren't the L shape tiles you get on an inner corner (which you can form from, say, combining I and _), but the outer corners. These corners are the little sections of frills that appear only in the very corner of the tile, and link together two edge-frill tiles on either side. So, for example, if you had a square of land in the middle of water, the corners of that square would be outer corners. That third square of pit frills has all four of those little blobs of frills in the corners.

Oh, I think I see what you mean now. Pretty sure BoE does also have these corners in addition to the separate wall-round-off corners.

Personally I would've preferred seeing this in the newer graphics, but nevertheless it looks pretty good.

On 10/27/2017 at 6:55 PM, Ess-Eschas said:

P. S. For those that are interested, I think that the early Exile games generate the frills automatically depending on which tiles border which tiles. If a terrain requires a frill, the appropriate frill of the pit tileset is overlaid over the bordering tile. You can see this most clearly in Exile 2, where the bridge tiles actually have land covering the end of the bridge if you look closely enough. The frilling is quite clever, since there are only 3 terrain frill tiles, both of which contain multiple sets of frills (west-east, north-south and corners).

 

At least in Blades of Exile, the corners aren't used for water and lava - instead, they're applied to the corners of the artificial walls (stone, adobe, or basalt). A water/lava corner simply gets both west and north frills, for example.

A new release build is probably possible right now, I guess. I honestly think it would be better for interested people to check out and compile master, though. Especially Mac users, since I'm not sure whether builds I make will run properly on the latest OSX - the gulf just keeps widening and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a point where stuff deprecated since 10.7 is simply removed.

Another option is labelling them that way here in this thread, rather than on Youtube.

Whoa cliffs overdose. O_O

*blinks*

Okay, I think we must have been talking past each other, because I was talking about Open Blades of Exile, not Exile III. Sorry for the confusion.

Note that Exile III for Windows is not a 32-bit app. It's a 16-bit app. 32-bit apps can run on 64-bit computers, and 16-bit apps can run on 32-bit computers, but 16-bit apps cannot run on 64-bit computers.

And uh, if I was going to go the virtualization route, why Windows on Linux? I barely use Linux at all, and I do use Microsoft Visual Studio since it's actually a pretty good IDE. Virtualizing Linux on Windows would seem to be a smarter plan if I were to go that way.

The linux branch is out-of-date. If you could merge master into the linux branch, I would expect it to work, but can't be certain (and the merge is probably not a clean one in any case). I'll get to that merge eventually; I just keep putting it off because booting up Linux means shutting down Windows.

The scons script "installs" the game in the source directory, under "build/Blades of Exile/", so if it said the build succeeded, that's where you'd have to look. If the build failed, I'd like to hear why. Note that the scons script doesn't quite seem to work on Windows (I was working on that a couple days ago).

OBoE does not use SDL, GTK+, or wxWidgets, though there is a possibility that the Linux port would have to use GTK+ for menus and file dialogs (but I'd prefer Qt or wxWidgets if we absolutely have to; I've also been contemplating a custom menus implementation). What it does use for rendering is SFML.

As far as I'm aware, the Linux branch is fully playable (unless there are game-breaking bugs that haven't been discovered). However, the lack of menus, combined with a bug in the "Save" function ("Save As" works, "Save" does not), means that it is impossible to save your game, so I wouldn't really recommend trying to complete a scenario on the latest linux branch build. The lack of menus also renders the scenario editor and party editor utterly useless.

Oh right, you can remove spells of level 1-3 now, too. That's probably more reliable than removing mage/priest spell levels.

Do you need to disable keystrokes to do that? Limiting magic can be done by changing the character's mage/priest spell levels, I would think (though it wouldn't be easy). Limiting the use of items should be possible by simply not giving any items, I think?

None of this is possible currently, but bundling one or more "skins" with a scenario could indeed be a possibility in the future. (My reasoning for this is to create the possibility of an opening cutscene similar to Exile 3, where you have the terrain view and nothing else visible, though this could also be made possible without actually supporting custom skins.) However, disabling keystrokes? Why on earth would you want that?

That is indeed a possible explanation for that discrepancy.

3 hours ago, The Almighty Doer of Stuff said:

MaidenWord I think was always used mostly just for talking, I think. It can always be adjusted in the final thing. I like what I'm doing now, except for no room for the text feed... hm... I'm trying to make it fit on my own laptop monitor. Hm...

No, I mean it wasn't used at all in the original Mac version of Blades of Exile. Instead, talking used a font called Dungeon Bold. The Windows version of BoE has always used MadenWord, I think. Maybe he just couldn't find a version of Dungeon Bold that worked on Windows.

1 hour ago, The Almighty Doer of Stuff said:

Thanks. Did you notice the buttons to collapse the panels that will grow the terrain view? Are those not enough? Maybe they could be collapsed into summary versions that are smaller but with less info prior to being collapsed altogether. Hm...

What if you showed a mockup of how they look when collapsed? That might help people decide if it's good.

1 hour ago, Thaluikhain said:

Excepting for 10, which seems wrong.  Don't people just click on the "cast mage" or "cast priest" drop down bars?  You could do it the other way if you wanted, but I never bothered.

I've never used those myself. I generally cast with the keyboard alone, which means 'm' + 'maybe space' + 'letter related to spell' + 'maybe shift + target party member' + 'enter'. Basically the same as what ADoS said, but with keys instead of clicks.

1 hour ago, The Almighty Doer of Stuff said:

The font I used is MaidenWord, the font that has always shipped with BoE.

 

Is this really the font that always shipped with BoE? My original Mac version uses a different font.

I have no idea what those weird up/down arrow buttons are for.

I don't really have any strong objections to any of ADoS's designs, but I don't plan to implement them myself, either; nor is the themability idea I mentioned earlier particularly high priority (though I do like the fact that it would allow a cutscene mode similar to Exile 3's opening cutscene, so I think there's a good chance I'll get to it at some point). If someone else implements designs like this, I'd probably be willing to offer them as an option for players.

Currently I'm working towards a straight 2x scaling of the UI, which should hopefully address the concern of things being too small. It'll probably look a little pixelated especially on non-retina screens, mind you; but then, it's mainly intended for the retina screens anyway.

EDIT: Oh, right. I'm not gonna implement a junk bag or quick-item slots, either. Quickspells are already available from the menus, as far as I'm concerned. (Or would be if they actually worked; I received a report that those were broken.)

I just want to point out that, as I envisioned it, the only thing this framework would allow is literally rearranging the things that are already present - not adding new things such as disabled buttons, a junk bag, or a larger terrain view. Of course none of these things are impossible, but they take more effort and I'm not sure I want to do them.

I figured you were going to say that. I'd much prefer not showing them at all when they're unavailable, though.

The only thing I could suggest about the left column is that, to me, it makes more sense to put special items at the bottom and quest/journal at the top.

The buttons are still a little questionable. I would suggest figuring out exactly what set of buttons will appear in each context - town, outdoors, and combat. The setup you have here may work for town and combat, with a few substitutions in both cases*, but it's utterly ridiculous for outdoors.

*The potion, camp, use, and talk buttons make no sense in combat. The PC/All, parry, and arrow buttons make no sense in town. Oh right, and the save/load buttons are also currently useless in combat.

While I'm still not in favour of redesigning the interface, I'm not opposed to allowing others to do so if they so choose. It might not be too difficult to make the interface somewhat customizable. Here's an example mockup of how that might be defined:

<!-- Original (or at least current) theme -->

<theme width="" height="">
    <party-stats x-anchor="right" y-anchor="top" x="" y="" height="">
        <number x-anchor="left" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
        <name x-anchor="left" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
        <status x-anchor="left" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
        <button action="switch" icon="" x-anchor="right" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
        <button action="info" icon="" x-anchor="right" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
        <!-- Other possible actions are create, delete, rename, picture -->
        <text ref="sp" x-anchor="right" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
        <text ref="hp" x-anchor="right" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
    </party-stats>
    <inventory x-anchor="right" y-anchor="middle" x="" y="" height="">
        <!-- The contents here describe a single row -->
        <number x-anchor="left" y-anchor="right" x="" y=""/>
        <small-icon x-anchor="left" y-anchor="right" x="" y=""/>
        <name x-anchor="left" y-anchor="right" x="" y="" show-charges="yes"/>
        <!-- Buttons would automatically show only when relevant -->
        <!-- Icon is a numeric index into some list -->
        <button action="info" icon="" x-anchor="right" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
        <button action="drop" icon="" x-anchor="right" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
        <button action="give" icon="" x-anchor="right" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
        <button action="use" icon="" x-anchor="right" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
        <button action="service" icon="" x-anchor="right" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
        <text ref="service-price" x-anchor="right" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
    </inventory>
    <transcript x-anchor="right" y-anchor="bottom" x="" y="" height=""/>
    <terrain x-anchor="left" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
    <info-bar x-anchor="left" y-anchor="bottom" x="" y=""/>
    <button-strip x-anchor="left" y-anchor="right" x="" y="">
        <!-- A button strip is a flow layout, so no need for anchors and x,y -->
        <!-- Icon here indexes a different list than above -->
        <button action="mage" icon="" show="always"/>
        <button action="priest" icon="" show="always"/>
        <button action="look" icon="" show="always"/>
        <button action="talk" icon="" show="town"/>
        <button action="get" icon="" show="town"/>
        <!-- Also size="quarter" may be allowed, given appropriate button backgrounds -->
        <button action="use" size="half" icon="" show="town"/>
        <button action="map" size="half" icon="" show="town"/>
        <button action="rest" icon="" show="outdoors"/>
        <button action="map" icon="" show="outdoors"/>
        <button action="save" icon="" show="outdoors"/>
        <button action="load" icon="" show="outdoors"/>
        <button action="parry" icon="" show="combat"/>
        <button action="get" icon="" show="combat"/>
        <button action="wait" size="half" icon="" show="combat"/>
        <button action="shoot" size="half" icon="" show="combat"/>
        <button action="peace" size="half" icon="" show="combat"/>
        <button action="solo" size="half" icon="" show="combat"/>
        <!-- Other possible actions might include:
            alchemy
            talk-notes
            enc-notes
            journal
            stats
            save-as
            
            Also, "rest" would work in town and mean "wait 100 moves"
        -->
    </button>
    <!-- This specifies where dialogue is shown in talk mode -->
    <dialogue x-anchor="left" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
</theme>

<!-- Latest ADoS theme -->

<theme width="" height="">
    <party-stats x-anchor="left" y-anchor="top" x="" y="">
        <number x-anchor="left" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
        <name x-anchor="left" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
        <status x-anchor="left" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
        <button action="switch" icon="" x-anchor="right" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
        <button action="info" icon="" x-anchor="right" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
        <text ref="sp" x-anchor="right" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
        <text ref="hp" x-anchor="right" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
    </party-stats>
    <inventory x-anchor="right" y-anchor="middle" x="" y="" height="">
        <number x-anchor="left" y-anchor="right" x="" y=""/>
        <small-icon x-anchor="left" y-anchor="right" x="" y=""/>
        <name x-anchor="left" y-anchor="right" x="" y="" show-charges="yes"/>
        <button action="info" icon="" x-anchor="right" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
        <button action="drop" icon="" x-anchor="right" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
        <button action="give" icon="" x-anchor="right" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
        <button action="use" icon="" x-anchor="right" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
        <button action="service" icon="" x-anchor="right" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
        <text ref="service-price" x-anchor="right" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
    </inventory>
    <terrain x-anchor="middle" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
    <info-bar x-anchor="middle" y-anchor="bottom" x="" y=""/>
    <button-strip x-anchor="middle" y-anchor="right" x="" y="">
        <button action="mage" icon="" show="always"/>
        <button action="priest" icon="" show="always"/>
        <button action="look" icon="" show="always"/>
        <button action="talk" icon="" show="town"/>
        <button action="get" icon="" show="town"/>
        <button action="use" icon="" show="town"/>
        <button action="rest" icon="" show="outdoors"/>
        <button action="save" icon="" show="outdoors"/>
        <button action="load" icon="" show="outdoors"/>
        <button action="parry" icon="" show="combat"/>
        <button action="get" icon="" show="combat"/>
        <button action="wait" size="half" icon="" show="combat"/>
        <button action="shoot" size="half" icon="" show="combat"/>
        <button action="peace" size="half" icon="" show="combat"/>
        <button action="solo" size="half" icon="" show="combat"/>
    </button>
    <dialogue x-anchor="middle" y-anchor="top" x="" y=""/>
    <map x-anchor="right" y-anchor="top" height="" width=""/>
    <transcript x-anchor="right" y-anchor="bottom" x="" y="" height="" width=""/>
</theme>

 

Whoa, that sounds complicated. It sounds like you're using states as functions, actually. Do you use a variable to determine the state to return to or something?

Last I checked, which was admittedly some time ago, MediaFire was a pretty good place to upload files. There are quite a few other options as well. DropBox and Google Drive (and Microsoft's equivalent, OneDrive or something) seem to be popular these days, though those are a little different from straight file hosting. You could also try seeing if one of the other members here wants to host it on their own websites.