Harehunter

Harehunter's Haven has a new home www.harehunter.info My BoE pages include a BoE graphics search engine similar to Brett Bixlers Louvre for BoA graphics. I also have a Visual Basic version of the BoE scenario editor that has some nice features, most importantly being able to tie a description to a Stuff Done flag and to see that description in the special node editor.

Harehunter's Haven has a new home www.harehunter.info The direct link for the Avernum 4 maps is www.harehunter.info/Avernum4/Maps/MainMap41.html

Harehunter's Haven has a new home www.harehunter.info The direct link for the Avernum 5 maps is www.harehunter.info/Avernum5/Maps/MainMap51.html

Harehunter's Haven has returned on a new URL www.harehunter.info The direct link to the Avernum 6 maps is www.harehunter.info/Avernum6/Maps/MainMap61.html

I had to send a request to Mariann to change the links on Spidweb proper. She should be able to help here as well.

Sorry Nikki, I thought that since you are a Mod you could do that. Thank you for passing on the request.

OK ya'll, I've asked for hints to improve the site and the response has been a deafening silence. From that I take it that it doesn't matter what it looks like, just get it up there fast. With that I present you with the following urls: Home page: www.harehunter.info Exile III maps: www.harehunter.info/Exile3/Maps/MainMap3.html Avernum I maps: www.harehunter.info/Avernum1/Maps/mainmap1.html Avernum II maps: www.harehunter.info/Avernum2/Maps/mainmap2.html Avernum III maps: www.harehunter.info/Avernum3/Maps2/index.html Avernum IV maps: www.harehunter.info/Avernum4/Maps/mainmap41.html Avernum V maps: www.harehunter.info/Avernum5/Maps/mainmap51.html Avernum VI maps: www.harehunter.info/Avernum6/Maps/mainmap61.html I still have to finish up the BoE and the BoA pages. Enjoy y'all, and if you have any problems, IM me or email me at hasen@flash.net. PS I already know that the links to the maps from the main page don't work, but if you click on the image to get to the sections main page the link works there.

Ok ya'll, I have a new site registered, and I am about to repopulate it. Before I do though I would like to ask for recommendations on ways to improve it. Remember this site covers all of Exile, All of Avernum, Blades of Exile and I have a bit of stuff for Blades of Avernum.

I just heard from byethost and they inform me that Harehunter's Haven has been ***very*** popular for a ***long*** time. Therefore, this is going to be permanent unless I upgrade to a paid account. They do have a Budget plan for ninety nine cents per month. The only restriction is that it is limited to a single domain name. For $12 a year, I think I can live with that. I could try Zymic for a while, but considering the usage on Byethost, I suspect that I would soon run crossways with Zymic as well. Besides, their site is down for maintenace waiting on a patch. Who knows when that will come up.

I was wondering what that unfinished thought was that EE was having. Since my pages are all static, I may be OK. I have posted the question to byethost as to whether the suspension is only temporary, or if my only option is to pull out the checkbook.

It seems that my website has been suspended due to heavier traffic than is allowed for a free account at byethost.com. I have the entire content on my home machine. Any suggestions for a new home will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you Solberg, If you have the time and/or ambition, I have an article on my website Cartography 101 that works well for any of the Exile / Avernum games. I just checked out the size on Exile 1 and the dimensions are the same; 240 x 240. If one was really ambitious, one could rebuild the terrain in Blades of Exile and then use the zoom mode to display them in the same format as Exile 3.

! So that explains why Jeff did that in all his games ! As someone who has done a lot of mapping, I noticed that he ***always*** has his stairs between the levels off by ***1*** square.

I've gotten about 80% of Exile III. I have all of Upper Exile, the main map of Valorim and most of the towns. I guess I should finish those.

Bulls eye Ishad. It is quite dynamic and extremely easy to do rapid on-the-fly design/development of any thing you can think of. I threw together a complete material requirements planning system in about two months. Another programmer was trying to build a simple hardware inventory system in Oracle and after a year, it still wasn't right. So my boss asked what it would take to do the thing in PICK, i said about two weeks, and got it done in one.

Is the limit you're trying to break out of the size of a data structure or the number of recurring instances of that data structure? For example, the data structure for a town monster definition does not need any variable length elements. It is a simple array of integers. The real problem is not the structure but the fact that the number of occurrences of that structure was fixed. To correct this problem, a parameter in the header section of the town would tell you the number of definitions and a pointer to the beginning of the list. You are correct that a CSV would be too simple, but the system of delimiters in PICK database is actually a 4 dimensional construct. CSV's only represent two dimensions. I use this to describe a bill of material consisting of some values that apply to the item as a whole, and a multivalued list of component parts which may consist of a single set of attributes or as many lines of data as are necessary to build this item. The advantage of this data structure is that you don't have repeating text for the tag for each value, everything is referenced by its position in the structure as marked by the delimiters; the third value of the fourth attribute of the 22nd record. Another reason I chose to load the entire file at once was due to the dynamic nature of my file layout. In Jeff's layout, the size of a towns data was the same for every town, so that it was easy to extract, manipulate, and replace the entire structure into the same place in the file. Now that I have variable numbers of the various data structures (variable # of fields, npcs, signs, dialogs, special nodes, ...) it becomes more difficult to insert a larger block of data into a file that had a smaller block to begin with. I would have had to read in the entire file in order to rebuild it with the expanded data size. A good compromise would be to have a separate file for each section/town/dungeon. I was just trying to follow the original model as closely as possible for simplicities sake. I'm not saying that a single file structure is the best. It just avoids the situation where you have not a directory of files for your multiple scenarios, but a directory of directories for the files of those scenarios. You would have to deal with conventions for identifying which data file was associated with which section/town of the scenario.

If we go in the direction of multiple files for the scenario, then why not use a real database engine such as mysql, or Exodus. As for the entire scenario in memory, I only did that because I could. It also makes it easier to match the terrain on the outer edge of an outdoor section if you have the adjacent sections in memory. When I am in Outdoor Terrain mode, when you are working near the edges, I am able to paint the terrain along the edge with cell from adjoining sections. Besides, with today's memory (even the memory available 10 years ago when I wrote this) it is not necessary to page-in page-out sections of the scenario. Shoot, I work with far larger Word documents than the average BoE scenario. I'm not saying binary is necessarily the only way to go, just throwing out stuff about its advantages.

I appreciate the objection to the endianess of binary files. The easy way to deal with that of course is to use the "magic number" at the very beginning of the file to determine whether to call the byte swap procedure or not. The advantage is that you can build fixed length record structures that can be retrieved in a single fetch with minimal overhead. And since numbers are stored in binary, there are no data type conversions to perform upon input or output. As an alternate method, we could store the data into dynamic length, delimited text strings. The database engine I work in uses the special characters (decimal values 255, 254, 253, 252) to delimit records, attributes, values and subvalues. (Relationally, records equate to rows, and attributes to columns. Values and subvalues represent third and fourth dimensional aspects of a nested table.) In the context of a dynamic array, the meaning of a value depends strictly upon its position in the string as measured by the limiters. To get an understanding of this refer to the pick-wiki site www.pickwiki.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl. XML is cool and it is all the rage. But so was COBOL when it came out and both constructs are just too verbose. They also have the same drawback as dynamic arrays, in that you either have to parse everything from beginning to end, or build indexes, which would have to parsed before you can get access to your data.

Yes, it is binary. It is more compact, and faster for reading it in. One other thing is that I read in the entire scenario when you open it, and write the thing in one swell foop. Actually, on writing the file, I delete the bak file if it exists, rename the current file to .bak, and write a new file. I do have access to a tool set that stores everything as dynamic delimited strings, but when I looked at how to build a scenario database, I would have to have broken it down into several files.

if this link becomes problematic, you can always link in via my home page, Blades of Exile, BoE Scenario Editor, and you'll find a list of links. I also have a link to the download directory that gives you access to everything there. http://hasenjs.byethost33.com/BoE/ExScenEd_Schema2.txt

CM, it seems that we have had similar ideas to many of the problems. The place where I got stuck was after I had built an editor that would read either format, but write the new format. That is when I faced the next challenge, building a game engine that would read either format, (converting the old version on the fly), and there I got stopped. Now that the code has gone open source, I don't have time to go any further.

The scenario file I built does do away with limits in almost every way. I do this by changing the static arrays of records into a dynamic array, resizing it as needed, and storing the count of elements in another variable so I know how many of a thing to read in. Feel free to download my Version 2 editor to see how this was done. The Visual Basic files are readable by any text editor. The one thing I could not see my way clear to was the limit of 10 NPC dialogs per town, There is a work around by using unused NPC (dialog nodes) from other towns, but you have to be careful to not use special nodes in their dialog.

http://hasenjs.byeth...ecial_Nodes.pdf This one works (for now) and I re did the other one as well. This is the full link in case the abbreviated shortcut fails again. hasenjs.byethost33.com/downloads/EXSCENED/Special_Nodes.pdf It seems that if you leave the htt:// on at the front of the URL, it gets turned into a hotlink, and gets abbreviated. If you select the line above and paste it into the address, it works OK.

I think I have taken care of some of the difficulty with working with Special Nodes. Check out my presentation: http://hasenjs.byethost33.com/downloads/EXSCENED/Special_Nodes.pdf

It is included in the zip file for my Version 2 editor. I'm working on providing a separate document that you can link to.