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"Has Species?" is on my list.

I modified the Has Enough Mage Lore? check into a general statistic check. Modification is only to specials.c. Here is a description of fields. ex1a: how much of skill ex2a: special to call if enough ex1b: skill index (-1 defaults to mage lore to preserve compatability) ex2b: 0, -1 - cumulative, 1 - highest, 2 - average, 3 - lowest, 10 + x - that PC. Comments?

I have plans for the checking of stats, it's on my list of things to do. My plan is as follows: edit the "Has Enough Mage Lore?" node to be "Has Enough of Statistic?". The fields will be as follows: ex1a: how much of skill ex2a: special to call if enough ex1b: skill index (-1 defaults to mage lore to preserve compatability) ex2b: 0, -1 - cumulative, 1 - highest, 2 - average, 3 - lowest, 10 + x - that PC. Comments on this? I may just code this up right now. We have an affect statistics, but not set them directly. I think this node and the one above used in conjunction can mimic a Set Statistic node.

I just created a Town Node to change the light level within a given town. The only function modified is specials.c. The arguments are as follows: ex1a: Light Level (0 - Fully Lit, 1 - Dark, 2 - Very Dark, 3 - Totally Dark) ex1b: Unused ex2a: Amount of Light to Change ex2b: 0 - Give, 1 - Take Away Note that setting ex1a to -1 has it do nothing and just serves to give the party (or take from) light. Comments?

I know this already, but I need to verify if this is a Windows only problem or something deeper.

Quote: Originally written by Miramor: The mindduel code appears to check for items that grant magic resistance (ability 75) instead of will (ability 53). If I'm reading this right it should be easy to fix. Hmmm...I'm looking at the OS X code and see ability 53 here. Are you looking at the Windows source? If so, could someone verify?

Update: Added the Wiki for OBoE at Desperance. It is very much under construction, but it should keep track of the changes made. Before making any changes, consult the wiki. OBoE Feature Enhancements Wiki

Update: The special queue is in place such that if a monster is killed during a special (or a special is called during a special loop for any other means) it will not error and call the specials normally.

Quote: Add a possibility to create "Friendly" Wandering Monsters, like the Soldier Patrols in E1/2/3 but make it also possible to attack the wandering monsters. (And they should be maybe able to attack normally with a short dialog window as well, if not possible already, can't remember if possible yet) This is already possible and not too difficult to do. Quote: Some people may like to use Skribbane Herb or similar drugs, but then a new item ability would be needed of course. (Possibly with an option in the Character Editor to counteract or let the time heal the effect) I don't think implementing Skribbane as a default item ability would be desirable. See my comment below on calling specials. Quote: Make it possible to hide any item ability with the ??? sign, like it was possible in the older Exile games, could make certain items more interesting. It should theoretically be possible to hide an ability. Unfortunately, this is broken. I'll look into it. Quote: Make it possible to make an item call a scenario special when used. (The item should be removed once the scenario is left of course) This should be possible. I'll try and implement it.

Yeah, definitely post how you did it because how it is theoretically possible on Windows is important.

Adding new dialog boxes as in? I think I might know what you are saying, but could you please be more specific. Just remember, there are differences between the Mac and PC versions when modifying certain things. EDIT: I think I know what you mean more now. Before making changes permanent, we should look to the usefulness of various fields. This is best gagued by community reaction. If something can be done another way and is only a convenience thing, then perhaps it is best left open for a more "useful" idea.

The petrification touch fix is already implemented in OBoE. There should be a thread detailing it.

Quote: Originally written by Octavo: I am having visions of a monster type that, on its death, creates two more of its kind and then kills them. Does the current loop protection guard against this, since they're not in the same chain? Infinite loops are possible as with any other sequence of nodes. It is the designer's responsibility to ensure these do not happen. The developers (me in this case) have provided an interrupt feature in the case of this to help out designers.

Possibly. I've been playing around with ResFool a bit and I've been making a little bit of progress on this front. Whether I can do this and preserve reverse compatability remains to be seen.

The monster record is a global/scenario wide thing. I feel it appropriate, as a matter of consistency, to make the calls associated with it be global as well. While there is no reason town nodes cannot be accessible, it feels inconsistent from a structural level to do so. If we want town based calls, the correct way to do this is to edit the individual monster menu, specifically the advanced calls. Again, this comes down to editing resources. If you or anyone else can figure this out, I'd be willing to code it up in a heartbeat.

It would be nice. Right now the one thing stopping me from doing the whole missile animation field is the fact that there is no space for it. Editing the resource file is difficult with the tools available in OS X, in other words I don't know how yet. If someone could figure this out, it would be great. Custom ones will be more difficult. However, again, we need the first before we can do this.

Update: added in the positive effect messages and I have extend it to the affect HP and SP nodes as well.

It is now possible to target monsters with some of the affect PC nodes. The nodes allowing this are: kill, poison, slow/haste, web, curse/bless, disease, dumbfound, sleep, and paralyze. To trigger this, set space ex2a to the monster ID number. Note that there is still a bug with monsters with special triggers upon death killed during node execution. A queue of sorts will be needed to fix this. Also, I still need to add some text fields for the positive effects upon monsters, Jeff only did ones for the negative ones. Comments?

Updated the list. Eventually I will prepare a more thorough documentation. There are still many other features/fixes to be done. Note that these mostly apply to the Mac version. Some work will need to be done porting the OBoE changes to PC.

I'm trying to keep external files to a bare minimum, in other words one for the scenario author to worry about. Blades of Avernum's biggest weakness is having too many files to keep track of. Besides, with 2^16 (about 65k) different campaign flags, collision is quite unlikely so long as people are nice enough to say which ones they used as well as use more obscure ones like 127,68. From a player's perspective, keeping the information in the party save file is easier. It is no effort on the part of the player.

For a long time there has been a demand to have scenarios be able to talk to one another. The concept has long been called campaign flags. So if an event happens in one scenario, a campaign flag can be set and in another scenario this campaign flag can be retrieved and things change based upon it. I'm envisioning one node in the General Specs to make this possible. It gets or puts a value from an SDF to a campaign flag. As for the number of campaign flags, I'm thinking 256 by 256 should suit our needs. Of course, we will need a way to record these to ensure that designers do not mix campaign flags. Comments?

That could probably be easily fixed.

I reworked the pointers as I had stated above. The tests I have run appear to work. I was also able to fix the save file problem. In doing so, I put in a version index at the beginning of every save file to help with future changes.

It's possible, albeit more difficult to implement as it is on a "monster type" level, not an individual monster level. I was going to call town, but then because monster types can be spread across multiple towns (outdoor combat?), it could yield some very weird results if the designer is not very careful. I would like to make this on the individual monster level, but the source code is set in such a way to make this somewhat difficult. An additional concern is that the BoE Editor code/resource will need to be modified to put an additional field or something of the sort. This specific menu is also quite "full" and requires manipulation of resources that I'm not sure how to do yet. So while I can look into it, I think there are other more immediate things that I can implement in the short term.

Suggestions are more than welcome, of course. To be implementable in OBoE, things must not break BoE scenarios in the way of actual errors or game balance. In other words, a scenario should created in BoE (theoretically) behave exactly the same when loaded in OBoE.