A less presumptuous name.

Originally Posted By: Spidweb I've been reading The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss to get myself in a light fantasy sort of mood before doing too much with Avernum. - Jeff Vogel I would just like to point out that I have this book sitting on my shelf waiting for me to reread the first book. I feel a deep connection with Jeff now! And yeah, I'll read the rest of the posts and contribute more later.

Originally Posted By: Goldenking I like how death was handled; the first time I had a party member on the verge of dying, I was afraid I'd have to resurrect him... Originally Posted By: Goldenking However, I do have two things I find irksome, both having to do with the mapping system. When I am in a town, like Goldcrag, I would prefer it to be able to enter a building without having to go into a different zone. This helps with exploration purposes in a very needed way, and it just seems faster to do than to have to load a new mini-zone, though I know it's seconds either way. Also, when I'm trying to get from one end of a large zone to the other, I think it would be useful to have the map, which you can access with the Tab button, be clickable. That way, I don't have to pull my cursor to the edge of the screen and wait, or click the minimap a variety of times. I can just click and go. The nice thing about the separate buildings is that a large building doesn't have to be large in the surrounding zone. You can shift the scale inside of the building to provide more overall space in a given location. The clickable minimap, well, I'm with you there.

Originally Posted By: The Mystic My only complaint is that the demo is so tiny compared to the other Spiderweb games; you get a good feel for the game, but it would have been nice to have one or two more areas to explore. Originally Posted By: Jeff By the way, while my demos are smaller than they used to be, they are still some of the longest demos out there. My demos used to be longer than some other full games, but, to be brutally honest, that's just bad business. The demo is still pretty large compared to most games, it seems. We're just spoiled kids that are used to having really long demos, so Avadon's demo seems short by comparison within Spiderweb.

Originally Posted By: Tcheedchee Originally Posted By: Master1 All new abilities gained by scarabs should show up on the bottom row of the abilities panel. I never had any issues with that. Are you looking in the abilities panel and not the training screen? Well, yeah, I did look at the abilities panel. I talk about THE ONE and only ability panel, which you get, when you type 'a' (for abilities ) during combat. Or which you use to reset your quick spell bars. Why shouldn't there be a bug, which you havn't encountered? Um... sorry? I was trying to be helpful; there is no reason to get snippy.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity Avadon leaves you realistically twisting in the wind, in precisely the way that most games I know do not. But it gives you something else to tie the game together, instead of the role of armchair general. With the big picture all fuzzy, you find yourself identifying with your small group of companions, and basing your convictions on your own decisions and experiences together. The coherent theme that finally does tie Avadon tightly together is the question of whether to believe in Redbeard as the all-seeing general that the player is not, or to conclude instead that the worm's eye view of your small group of Hands is ultimately more valid than his perspective. This is as profound a question, I think, as any Jeff has treated before. It's harder to debate about than, say, Shapers versus Rebels. But it's also more relevant to the real world, and I can imagine that Avadon may stay in my thoughts for a long time. I can tell you that I'm still not certain where I lie on the loyalty spectrum. In my first run through, I tried to walk the line and hold off my decision until the very end. I ended up with pretty much everyone dissatisfied with me. Not very satisfying. I'm not playing through one extreme, and I'll try the next extreme sometime in the future. Maybe that'll give me a fuller picture and help me choose.

Sorry for the double post, I didn't see this and I'm too lazy to put a quote into an edit. Originally Posted By: Geneforgeisformeyukkyu Edit: New bug - I cannot drop any items onto the ground anymore and get the message "can't drop anymore items here ( store some items in a different area.)" Now that I open chests or coffins, I see no items even if I hadn't explored it beforehand. This now applies to every chest I open ;-;. Either it is me or every time I save, a little bit of the data becomes corrupted. I know similar issues have been encountered in earlier games. There seems to some limit on the number of items that can exist in a given zone. If you drop too many daggers and other useless things in an area, it will mess up the game and cause other items in the zone to poof.

Originally Posted By: yarrmateys yeah, i had the junk bag problem too. most of the stuff is sold, but some persistently stayed, like the bricks you get from the brick spawner item. i had to throw them out one by one and litter the floor with them. +1. I've found that, in general, items with no sell value aren't sold through the junk bag, with a few possible exceptions. Originally Posted By: yarrmateys [A]lso another, though very minor graphical one i noticed was that if you hold shift to see the names while your characters are off screen, the "roster" image will turn all green, or sometimes purple for no reason. I too have this coloring issue. Are you by any chance using an older Apple computer. Jeff has mentioned that this is linked to PPC machines. Originally Posted By: Tcheedchee Another one: Not sure, if it's a bug. It comes with one of the scarabs. The scarab offers the ability "group mental cure", but the ability doesn't show up in the ability pane. I've checked all the health ability icons as well. There is one that offers cure of 1 curse effect, but none that cures mental effects. Bug or misinterpretation? All new abilities gained by scarabs should show up on the bottom row of the abilities panel. I never had any issues with that. Are you looking in the abilities panel and not the training screen?

Try completely uninstalling and redownloading/installing the game. If that doesn't work, leave your full system details (computer, processor, RAM, etc.) and someone can help you further.

Originally Posted By: Geneforgeisformeyukkyu Closing the window with esc is still more work than just pressing 'I' or 'g' again. I actually find that the escape and enter keys are more conveniently located than "i" and "g," so I have to disagree with your claim. You may find the "i" and "g" keys preferable, but it's not universal.

If I weren't a high school teen, I would leave Facebook in a flash. There is so much crap on it. If it weren't my primary means of communication with most of my peers, it would get canned. Instead, I'm constantly there.

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba Avernum 6 had some problems with auto-movement. Dikiyoba hasn't run into any problems with Avadon yet, so whatever it was in A6 must not have carried over. I never saw it in Avernum 6 (go figure, I never played that game (don't lecture me, I know it's awesome)), but I have seen it in Avadon on rare occasion. It's not often enough that I can justify serious complaining, I just thought that I would add it to an existing topic. Overall, the pathfinding algorithm works beautifully, particularly with the "stopped by enemy" feature, which reminds me of Wesnoth (another game I've yet to finish).

Originally Posted By: —Alorael , who notes that Drakey showed up here just a couple of days ago and made a few posts. Before that he'd been absent for almost a year. I noticed that, but I figure that I don't have any authority to announce his return. I've actually seen quite a few oldbies (member numbers <1000) back on the boards recently. I guess they still follow the company enough to see new releases.

Every so often, though, a ranged attacker will walk in a circular path when they're auto-moving. I can have a character in a clear area 2 or 3 spaces out of range, and they'll walk in a circle around the radius of the range and then run out of points.

On what difficulty are you playing? I almost never needed consumables until I started doing quests that were scripted to have helpers without telling the helpers to join in the fight (final quest in the Kva sequence). Then again, I was on Casual. I've been playing through a bit on normal, and it doesn't seem much harder. The auto-life-regen after each battle really helps; I'm less afraid of taking an extra hit, so I kill enemies slower and conserve vitality.

I only played on Casual, and that fight never game me trouble; I killed half of the group before they could touch me. I do agree that when enemies are hasted beyond 2 turns to my one, and there is a huge group of them, that it is quite unfun. I'd be okay with them having 2x hitpower, but the extra turn lets them continually buff, heal, and attack all before I can even move.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Related question: I was playing the demo, and noticed that Sev levelled up a few encounters before my character did. I was playing on Torment. Is this normal? (Unrelated question: Is it normal for the blue bar not to regenerate while you're in a dungeon? It probably is, but it made me very conservative when using powers.) As has been stated in some other thread, each character joins you with a slightly different amount of exp, so while you all gain the same amount, your levels are slightly staggered. (Unrelated answer: energy is only regenerated when returning to Avadon or touching a pillar, with a few special exceptions.)

My understanding is that F is saying that some verbs are different regarding the simple past and the past participle. For example, "walk" only has a single form - I walked - I have walked, whereas verbs like "run" have different forms - I ran - I have run. A way that I think of this is that both verbs have the same number of forms, it's just that two forms of the first group of verbs are identical. Reading all of this, I can imagine that, were I a Frenchman learning English, I would be relieved and confused at the same time.

I concur with Alorael. English doesn't like to change the actual verb nearly as much as it likes to add "helping" verbs. A number of regular verbs have only a handful of forms, such as "walk." Walk, walks, walked, walking. You can make any tense for any subject from those, unless I am mistaken. Oh, and the infinitive, of course.

Yes, it does. Forgive me for not having good Latin spelling skills, I take French. I can't spell well in that, either.

Wikipedia doesn't lie Originally Posted By: Wikipedia Hahn, nicknamed the "Radioactive Boy Scout", is an Eagle Scout who received a merit badge in Atomic Energy and spent years tinkering with basement chemistry which sometimes resulted in small explosions and other mishaps. He was inspired in part by reading The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, and tried to collect samples of every element in the periodic table, including the radioactive ones. Hahn diligently amassed this radioactive material by collecting small amounts from household products, such as americium from smoke detectors, thorium from camping lantern mantles, radium from clocks and tritium (as neutron moderator) from gunsights. His "reactor" was a large, bored-out block of lead, and he used lithium from $1,000 worth of purchased[1] batteries to purify the thorium ash using a Bunsen burner.[2] --- Although his homemade reactor never achieved critical mass, it ended up emitting dangerous levels of radioactivity, likely well over 1,000 times normal background radiation. Alarmed, Hahn began to dismantle his experiments, but a chance encounter with police led to the discovery of his activities, which triggered a Federal Radiological Emergency Response involving the FBI and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. On June 26, 1995 the United States Environmental Protection Agency, having designated Hahn's mother's property as a Superfund hazardous materials cleanup site, dismantled the shed and its contents and buried them as low-level radioactive waste in Utah. Hahn refused medical evaluation for radiation exposure.[1

Having two dear Islamic friends, one Shi'a and one Sunni, I can tell you that the reason for the split that they tell you in history class is pretty much only valid in history class. Think of it like evolution: a condition causes one part of a population to change, and, over time, while the condition that initially caused the evolution may no longer be relevant, the evolution isn't going to undo itself. And I'm not going any further on that topic, because I don't know nearly enough and I don't want to offend anyone who knows/cares more than I do.

Originally Posted By: FnordCola Of wine, I saw, I conquered? Please tell me that you're kidding.

Originally Posted By: Randomizer Edit - The first two secret switches are in the Dungeon of Avadon. Where in the Dungeon? I don't think I've ever seen them down there. Either that or they were so obvious that I didn't realize they were hidden.

Originally Posted By: Dantius I didn't even learn sequences and series in Calc- geometric series, arithmetic series, infinite series, sigma-notation, and even infinite and finite products were covered before calc. Granted, things like integral convergence tests weren't possible, but a/(1-r) hardly require advanced calculus techniques. It's really interesting to see how the school district has set up things. Our "GT*" kids take algebra 1 and 2 in middle school and geopmetry, precalc, calc AB, and maybe BC in high school. I have peers that aren't in this "GT" track, and they're covering things in their "college algebra" or whatnot class that I didn't learn until calc BC. Notably, they were working with unit vectors and dot products (not cross, though). These things were taught to us as part of Vector Calculus after we had finished the College Board curriculum. The fundamentals that they were doing don't require calculus, and it was interesting to see them learning them before the kids that are paced ahead of them. Yeah, I think we push math too hard in Maryland and end up not covering the basics well enough. *Gifted and Talented. Note the "quotes."

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES Originally Posted By: *i One thing to keep in mind, however, is that the Middle Eastern culture tends to value such symbols as important I'm confused. How does "the Middle Eastern culture" value leaders, founders, and other symbolic humans more than the West does? Stareye didn't say that the Middle Eastern culture values symbols more than any other culture; he merely stated that they value them greatly. And thanks, Stareye, for the response. I also asked my AP US History teacher this morning, and she replied something along the lines of Osama being a delegator and facilitating various goings-on in the Middle East.