BMA

This is great 😁 Just saw the Discussions tab in Steam (thought it was in the reviews at first). Modding is something to be concerned about now. It looks like even Jeff approves.

I'd come across a very, very old forum post in which he seemed very critical of modding. Wonder what changed his mind since then? And it's also great that he's continued to keep each game's scripts as editable text files that we can study and modify.

I'm sure the Geneforge 2 remake will be my favourite. Until then it's a tie, Mutagen v/s Geneforge 5. I can't decide

Avernum 3's great (not as good as Geneforge of course 😛). I just couldn't get into the 2nd trilogy Avernum 4+ mainly because I couldn't get past the 'stiffness' of the characters' walking / movement animation. That was especially off-putting after having seen the same character models walk smoothly in the Geneforge games. This didn't matter in the 1st trilogy BTW, since the characters were so tiny anyway. And Blades was great too

Nethergate seemed prmoising but only played a bit. Maybe some day

Exile I'll sadly never try. I'd have enjoyed it if I'd been in the right place with the right PC at around the time it was released

9 hours ago, alhoon said:

Anyone knows how to deal with the scuttlebugs? 

No, or at least I didn't see anything till now. Though it's nice to have some more [spoiler] minor-annoyance sort of creations from the rat tier [/spoiler]

Weapon Shaping definitely makes the Guardian more interesting. Never realized it before, but GF1's Guardian is a bit boring IMO. But I'm still undecided on whether this alone would make it worth continuing as a Guardian, or if a Shaper would be better. Tough choice 🤔

Just saw the demo for Geneforge 2 is available on Steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/2480560/Geneforge_2__Infestation/

So G2 will at least have the Rotgroth, Gazer, Drakon and their variations - can't wait! All the more reason to play as a Shaper the further you go into the series, I'd forgotten how limited G1 really is when it comes to creation types.

Most of my playthrough was as a Guardian with no points put into magic, instead having Magic creations do the buffing from the back (War Blessing / Protection / Acid Spray / Charm). This way the Guardian is the primary damage-doer (with the only complaint being lack of multi-target abilities, and being difficult to retreat when overwhelmed). I've not completed the game though, so I don't know how much more difficult it can get.

4 minutes ago, alhoon said:

 

I pray that happens, but it took @TheKian a lot of his free time to make the modding suite for GF5. Asking him to go in practically blind since so many things changed in GF1-M to make a new one is a bit... you know. 

Yeah it's an amazing tool, I'm sure it would have taken a ton of effort to build and fine-tune it. Speaking of which, if the code is uploaded to Github / open-sourced at any point (it was made in Java iirc), I'd love to take a look and possibly (me or anyone else who's interested) can contribute. I'd taken a stab at making something similar earlier.

But even before that, if the GF1-M scenario format is very different and there's a ton of discovery work to list out which part of the scenario does what, I wonder if it's worth it. Especially since interest in the game will taper off over the next few months, and then we'll have to do it again (although to a lesser extent) for the GF-2 remake.

I think @Ishad Nha had figured out most of the scenario format for Geneforge 5, there was a wiki containing zone offsets - not sure if it's still up now. It's probably easier to figure out the new format based on the old one (knowing what to look for), but it'll still take some digging around.

I'm not sure how much work it'd be to rewrite the G5 Modding Suite based on the new offsets - or if there's enough level-designing interest to make it worthwhile. But I guess there'll always be interest in playing custom levels once they're made.

58 minutes ago, madrigan said:

What I really want is to shape a Servile sidekick. 

This would be cool to have, wonder why it was never done till now.

I'd love to have something like Spore (wishful thinking) but the existing shaping mechanic is already pretty neat - wouldn't have expected it based on the original series.

21 hours ago, alhoon said:

Base with storage boxes: Can't we use the actual storage boxes in the zones?

Yeah we can do this, I just fancy having a dedicated base area with different boxes to categorize stuff in. BTW this can be added into the game ourselves, if the Scenario Editor that was made for Geneforge 5 is ported over to Mutagen. More people are likely to use it now, considering the active playerbase.

20 hours ago, kuo said:

My approach is to drop everything on the ground...one pile for shaper equipment, one pile for batons and javelins, another pile for wearable equipment, and so on...

I end up doing this, only I don't have separate piles. It's just a large, rectangular pile of items.

20 hours ago, TriRodent said:

Bringing all the equipment/ingredients to make say an omelette would be nice, but it's more practical to wait until I get back to make it.  So I'm venturing out into the world with my truck keys, wallet, cell phone, & pocket knife...

Yeah but you don't know in advance (usually) what types of enemies you'll come across and what status effects they might inflict (poison / acid etc). So you carry bits of everything for both attack and defense. In this case carrying 2 pods each of different types is more expensive than carrying 20 pods of one type. Maybe it'll be harder in future games if there are crafting components, new items etc.

19 hours ago, googoogjoob said:

The removal of an inventory weight limit, and the existence of the junk bag at all already favors a hoarding playstyle

Didn't realize this before, it does indicate that the game economy "expects" you to be carrying and selling junk. Other turn-based RPGs don't seem to have this issue, since there's usually multiple characters each having a separate inventory. Though on second thought I'm happy that the inventory limit is not decided by Strength, which would require non-Strength playthroughs to increase the skill for no other reason.

I was looking through the forums for related posts and came across a similar topic - ancient post

I've found that the inventory storage space available is not enough towards the middle and later half of the game. There are many pods, spores, attack items, batons, thorns all of different types. Some of these are non-optional (like living tools and healing pods/spores) so they take up permanent slots in the inventory. If you carry 3 types of batons and their thorns (which you should, if you're a self-respecting Guardian) that alone takes 20% (5 cells) of your inventory.

I've often found myself using the junk bag to temporarily extend my storage - only now the junk bag contains both junk and non-junk. This defeats the purpose of having it, since now I've to go back to town to take items out, and also have to sort through the bag and take out the useful items before selling the rest - this is more work than play. Maybe I deserve this since I'm using the junk bag in a way that's not meant to be used, but I'm only going to blame the dev for giving me the option to shoot myself in the foot.

This is a relatively minor annoyance, but it's been mentioned here and in Steam reviews a few times. I'm hoping this feature gets reworked - maybe Jeff could go back to to limiting inventory items based on the player's skill rather the number of inventory slots (or extend the inventory with a few additional slots). Also if you're only meant to wear (not carry) items specific to the zone you're going into (say a cloak with fire protection for a zone full of enemy fyoras), it'd be nice to have a base with storage boxes to keep all such items in.

Not a backer, but I was hoping the Steam page would be up for release in the next few hours (12 AM PST) https://store.steampowered.com/app/1424710/Geneforge_1__Mutagen/

Is there a secret URL-only download on the Spiderweb website that gives you the download before the actual release time 😀

Edit - it's up on Steam now

We are working on a fancy remaster of our all-time most popular game

I'd thought that was Geneforge. Oh well, it's probably next in line after Avernum 3.

Edit : Jeff says that the Geneforge remake will happen in 3+ years : https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/52xrub/im_jeff_vogel_i_run_spiderweb_software_since_1994/

Yeah I know, I had been following the byte-deciphering here from the start. I've saved copies of the BoG wiki's web pages jic, but it would be nice if it can be hosted online. I've wanted to make a zone-maker, kind of like LF's Zone Simulator but which can create new zones from scratch (or say from a template) instead of just editing them.

It should be offset 106, but I have never attempted to add additional towns myself...

Then you might want to give a new town its own record in the header of the scenario data file.

@Ishad If we were to create a new zone, do you think it would be enough to change offset 106 (number of towns) from 82 to 83 and then add 52088 bytes of new zone data after the last zone, and then add it's own 'town location record' (20 bytes) into the header ? Oh yeah and there's the entrance into the new zone from an existing one. Whew, that does sound a lot. But if we could manually create a zone by moving and adding bytes around on a hex-editor, then making a program out of it shouldn't be too hard.

I've been wanting to make a zone-editor using the floor/terrain/character bytes info on the BoG Wiki for a while now (using C#/WPF and SDL 2) but have been putting it off as usual.

The number of zones are hard-coded at the beginning of the scenData file. So if we were to create a completely new zone (say a basement, since that would probably be easiest), and add the new bytes to the file, what else then would have to be changed, what info should be added to the header (if at all, like Ishad Nha was saying) or would it simply suffice to create an entry point (ladder or steps) from inside an existing zone which points to the zone-number of the custom zone ? I'll be fiddling around with the bytes to find out how, and I'll post here if I do.

Very nice !

I always felt that's exactly what you'd expect serviles to sound like. Wonder where Jeff got the sounds from.

I found a similar question; chap says something about being able to play by bypassing some warning but I didn't understand much of it.

Only 13 years, somehow I thought it would be much more than that. But then, that makes the post count all the more impressive.

Congrats on the residency !

Though my memory's foggy, I don't remember having any trouble with mirrors. It was made by StarEye iirc and has a good rating, so since nobody's replied by now I guess nobody had this problem.

I haven't played BoE, but if you're playing BoA for the first time maybe there's something (controls/movement) that you might have missed with the engine/view change.

Can scenarios be called mods in NM ? (at least there's no ambiguity for BoG/other fan-made remakes - maybe we could make something out of that, but not sure about scenarios).

The SW forum logo does look a lot less sombre with all that pink

I was going to ask how the forums were filled with pictures of ponies - everybody's avatars, the SW logo, the forum icons - all ponies. But I found that my forum theme had somehow been changed to "besttheme" which is what was causing all the ponies.

I did believe for a second that the forum code/database had been invaded by pony lovers, but I knew that could not happen and that this was an inside job.

But I don't know how my theme changed of it's own accord; if it was intentional, great - I liked the surprise.

Obscurity is what happens to a game when it has had open-ended ancestors

I did think there was some story though, 'specially seeing that some prominent characters seem to recognize you from somewhere.

...How about flavor-baconed milk?