Thaluikhain

On 12/17/2017 at 4:35 AM, Zaego said:

Luminous contact-lenses. Can you imagine the amount of horror and fun those things could spread?

Attaching a light source to your own eyeballs might not be that practical.  Luminous eye shadow, perhaps...

Does that include Upper Exile, and/or the Vahnatai lands underneath?  A three dimensional territory would easily allow you to increase the area, though this doesn't seem to come up much, probably because it'd be a nuisance to stick on a simple 2d map.

Oh, congrats

Congrats!

23 hours ago, The Almighty Doer of Stuff said:

The sense in which I think it's hard to use is I've tried to introduce literally dozens of people of all levels of gaming and RPG experience to BoE, and they all hated it because they don't like the interface because they say:

1. it's hard to use
2. it's clunky and ugly
3. nothing is labeled clearly
4. things look like they're duplicated
5. there's two dozen keyboard shortcuts to learn without any easy-to-find, simple, handy reference chart or means of customization
6. there's a forty page manual to read instead of making it intuitive, and the instant help popups are annoying
7. the window is tiny on modern monitors
8. the font is small and hard to read
9. there are no hover-over tooltips
10. you have to click at least four times just to cast a spell every time unless you're casting the same one as last time (you'd be surprised by just how much most people despise clicking, I know I was when I found out).

Huh...that seems very odd to me, but if it's happened to you multiple times, fair enough.

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.

In regards to the later layout, at first I was very strongly opposed, but I think that it might just be the font.  A less arty, more normal font and things would work better, though I think I'd prefer the map to not separate the stats and inventory, to me those should be next to each other.

In what sense do you think the old interface doesn't work well.  I always thought it was basic, but functional, and I liked that.

Also, why move stats and inventory over to the left?  Not seeing the advantage in that.

Hmmm...personally, I'm against it, I like being able to see 8 items instead of just 3.  Yeah, I can scroll up and down, but it'd be handy to see more at one time.  I personally prefer functionality to aesthetics, but that might just be me. 

I would suggest, though, if going for the bigger pictures, to make better use of the expanded room to the right of the pic.  I don't like the "Charges: N/A" stuff, but having the weight, for example, might be worthwhile.  Possibly base GP price?  Damage for weapon or protection for armour and so on might be nice, but rather more fiddly, don't know if it'd be worth the effort.

Those look pretty good.  With the waveblade one, I think if you swapped the standing one for the attacking one it'd work better.  The standing waveblade one and the standing one under that look very similar, though.

Also, and this might just be me, but the human in the middle row, 4 down?  On more than one occasion I've not been paying attention when casting a firestorm or something against troglodytes, and there's a trog with a similar looking shield and I've accidentally targeted my own PC.  Not sure if other people do that sort of thing, but if so, do the PC vahnatai look sufficiently different to the NPC ones?

Hmm, ok, thanks.

I vaguely remember something about when the party was in a boat, they couldn't change towns (use a staircase, say).  I'm not sure if this was the case, or if it had been fixed.

I guess, if you couldn't do that, you could leave the town, go to a small outside section, and then go back into another town, rather than move from one to the other directly.

It's very easy for someone who isn't doing the work and has no knowledge of what's involved to talk about what should be done, so I'll do that then.  While I do like the idea of enlarging the graphics, I don't like the idea of moving all the button and stuff around.  Same layout, but with everything enlarged seems best to me.

Mind you, as it is, it's easy to move the map under where the action is, and have the program take up half the screen and have something else on the other.  I don't know if that sort of thing would appeal to many others, though.

Out of interest, why was there a change in cave floors for E3 to BoE?  Other graphics I could imagine just not being necessary or seeming too old, but I don't see why white floors are better than aqua.

Yup...and if there's a spot on the map I can't get into it's infuriating.

Oh, and gotta scry monster them all.

Bit late to this (and yet to make any scenarios myself), but:

Yeah, I'm one of those people who tended to ignore those "this scenarios is designed for specific level or specific save file" warnings. Nowdays, though, I just tend to use the editor more when I get stuck. I tend to play for the story, the grind is just something along the way.

Speaking of grind, I'm not a fan of big, multi level dungeons, at least not when you are exploring them thoroughly. I go in, clear a bit out, take all the treasure, go to a nearby town and sell it and come back. In a big dungeon that means I have to keep commuting to work through bits I've already cleared out before I can get to the new stuff, and that gets annoying. Likewise, friendly towns where it's inconvenient to reach whoever I want to talk to.

In general, I'd recommend playing a bunch of BoE, see what you like, see what you don't. Commonly people wanting to make a scenario for the first time were told to make something small and get it done, but there was also the idea that your first scenario (or, in my case, my first dozen and counting) won't be finished. So make it as big as you like, try out weird and wonderful things, learn how to do things, and this will help after you've given up on that one and start the next one.

Especially the custom graphics, lots of fun making those, and the stuff you don't use for one scenario can easily be used for another.

(Actually, should go back to working on mine at some point)

EDIT: Oh, another advantage to short scenarios, I might actually finish them. If a scenario gets too long and starts to drag I generally won't give up as such, I'll save the game and maybe come back later and forget about it. This could just be me, though.

(The best indications, btw, are that the company currently has 2 employees, counting Jeff. It's never had more than 3. Though maybe you knew that and I am just missing the edge to what you said...)

Yeah, knew it was about that many, but I thought I'd er on the side of caution and say 5.

Seems a strange thing to lose. In any case, he's probably got more important things to do than much about with that, not like he runs a big company with a whole 5 people in it.

You can also see that the breath weapon for the drake lord is listed under it's ability which suggests exile 3 doesn't have a dedicated spot for breath weapons. The dark wyrm's ability is paralysis touch.

Ah...now that I think of it, I can't think of a monster that has a breath weapon that has another ability, at least in E3. That makes sense.

I think I have Domestic Evil...though do the scenarios have straightforwards names? Domestic Evil is "de", for example.

As for reviews, would things be much different now? Apart from scenarios notable for being different than the others at the time, for using the editor i new and inventive ways, not seeing why things would change much. Excepting Inn of Blades, which would be much shorter if made today.

Oh, that's quite impressive. Some of them seem a bit odd, but I guess that's cause I'm used to the older ones.

I should give that a try. Most of the graphics I've made aren't from scratch, they are rehashes of the stuff that came with BoE, but I'll have a go.

Jeff should not be encouraging hoarding.

He's also encouraging thorough cleaning. Given there's a limit to how many items you could leave, I'd spend some time clearing away rocks and picking up the garbage in Hawke's Manse and Fort Emergence.

Also had the advantage of being in Fort Emergence, somewhere you'll visit often. The other two were in a decent spot for convenience, but they were located very close to each other, didn't really need two of them there.

Unicorn horns aren't included as an item in the base anyway, so I hadn't planned to make unicorns drop them.

Huh...was sure that they did. My mistake.

Oh, would you put all the regeants in? Crypt shrooms, for example, have an equivalent item, but don't exist unless someone adds them.

Well, I assume some people do. The reason why I need to deal with it one way or another is because when two items stack, one of the items is destroyed and its charges are added to the other item's charges. In other words, it's effectively arbitrary whether you get the stats from one item or the other. (Technically, I believe you'll always get the stats of the item you're already carrying, meaning the stats of the scenario item will be lost.)

Ah, but if you were just giving a new flag to those items, what's to stop that flag number having being used in some other scenario for something else? Actually, what's to stop that happening normally, without worrying about odd things in the official scenarios?

Hmm, good point. Player-summoned monsters never drop "glands", but monster-summoned monsters do

Why is that? To stop player summoning monsters and killing them for their stuff or something? Seems odd.

(Getting a bit off-topic, but unicorns dropping unicorn horns which, IIRC, have no value except you can sell them to one person in E3...that sees a bit pointless in BoE unless people are in a scenario that specifically does something with them)

A unique flag so that they don't stack seems to make sense, maybe some arrows are just different. I don't like the idea of changing the items to match some of the scenarios, you still have to pick a value for each and change things to match. Don't like the idea of changing the official scenarios...there's also area descriptions that probably should be one time only, but then I'd argue that the scenarios should be left as is.

However, in any case...does anyone actually use missile weapons? Certainly, it'd be better if there weren't errors, but not sure how often it'd actually affect anything. So I don't really have a strong opinion on this.

The Dark Wyrm...well, people can edit their own monsters to have whatever breath they like without any issue. Asps can be summoned by Sticks to Snakes, however, so their stats matter.

Hmmm...in that case, how do you tell what type of breath it has? Do they all have different graphics? Or do you need various protections from other breath types with the same graphics and see what causes damage?