The Almighty Doer of Stuff

He said he'll probably put it on YouTube soon. He kept checking that it was recording, and it was. It'll be uploaded in two parts.

Not presently, no. Sorry. We're hoping it will happen someday but there are currently no plans to make that happen.

Aw, the bear creature isn't either? It fits right in and Kattana certainly didn't draw it. Maybe it was Luz... I'll have to dig through the scenarios' readmes to find it at some point, then.

http://www.OpenBoE.com/ados/TimFBoEGraphics.zip That's everything I could find, Tim. Some of it was mislabelled on the site where I got all the old graphics though; you can see one bear creature is labelled as being made by Kattana. Also, filename credits were chosen seemingly based on the scenario a modified graphic was taken from, rather than the original artist, in many cases. That Fungoid Queen graphic: Was that yours? Shyguy's graphics don't typically seem to reach that level of quality and I know he modified other graphics of yours. I'd like to stick some tentacles on it in place of the rocks, if I'm sure the graphic is clear to be included with the program someday.

Hello, Tim! Yes, we have many of your graphics, and we picked out a bunch of them that will ship with BoE eventually. I was able to reach Luz and Milu and get permission to use their work as well. I never reached ShyGuy. I can certainly ZIP your graphics and post them here in a bit. As for helping with the project and programming, Celtic Minstrel would be the one to talk to.

You can set full-screen mode on or off in Preferences, along with 2x UI scaling.

Nevertheless, this doesn't have to be a competition. I am under a lot of stress from other sources and it doesn't need to leak out onto here. I apologize for losing my temper.

I have no further comment on the main topic of this thread. I am satisfied with the responses and don't plan to push for expanding the terrain view. Asking questions about something isn't the same as feeling strongly about it. Slarty has a way of phrasing minor disagreements as though they are calamities however, and I'm always the one getting it from him. I did nothing aggressive or strongly-felt in this thread until he jumped on me yet again.

I think me asking questions about an idea isn't what drives people away. But go ahead and compare my input on the project to vomit. Then feel free to participate yourself.

Why isn't it valid?

I disagree. If, by some strange chance, there is an unknown worth-playing legacy scenario that comes to light, we can just stick the node in that one too.

I just had a thought. Create a "Restrict Field of View" node. It can: -alter how far away a player can see, -select a square or circular field of view, -select whether to use the fog of war fringe, and -enable or disable scrolling. We can edit the relevant scenarios and stick them in there. I was thinking we should probably do some bug fixing for custom scenarios anyway, subject to the same "ask us to stop if you don't want your scenario altered/included with the program" practice which has been discussed before. There are some really solid scenarios which have gamebreaking bugs, IIRC. I don't think the designers would want a good scenario they made being unplayable, at least not this long removed from when it was designed. Thoughts?

Thanks! That was a good list like I was hoping for. I just wanted to get an idea. Worth noting is that even in legacy BoE, you could already click the light brown border to scroll the view around, breaking many of those scenes as you say. But at least now I know what everyone is talking about and what we're dealing with.

I need some info for OpenBoE GUI purposes: Does anyone know of any scenarios which rely on having a terrain view no larger than 9 x 9 tiles? There are a handful of scenarios with cutscenes, and one of TM's scenarios has some photo opportunities, but is that it? I'm working on a GUI which fills the screen with terrain view, much like recent Spidweb games. So I need to know what exceptions we'll have to account for.

At least someone confirm to me that they see nail polish and a hair bow on that spider and that I've not spent too much time around the GIFTS.

The spider is second to last on MONST2, and the glowing slith is last on the same sheet, in the WIndows version. I adjust my statement on what they are. In Avernum: Escape From The Pit, there is no Spider Lord, but there is a Spider Queen. I suspect this was a late change in Exile 1, which was changed back in the remake remakes (and also the remakes maybe?). It'd be humorous, I suppose, to see the fearsome queen of the man-eating, flamethrowing spiders done up in nail polish and a pink hair bow, but I can see why Jeff would decide against it. I still believe the slith is a Slith Avatar, the powerful ghost of an honored slithzerikai. In Avernum: Escape From The Pit, Slith Avatars fight you in outdoor encounters if you invade their crypts, and they are glowing, blue slithzerikai warriors. This may have been skipped just because it's not a well done graphic and looks a little tacky. I can't imagine this relatively unfearsome slith that looks like an everyday grunt would be the mighty Sss-Thsss, so either it is Sss-Thsss and was unused for that reason, or it is a magical glowing dead slith like in A:EFTP.

Probably a good idea. That way people don't accidentally clip a chicken with the spell and make everyone hate them. In fact what might be nice would be a different color highlight for friendly characters.

Oh. Implementing that highlight for spells like that would be good, actually. Thanks for the suggestion!

Oh. No, there's no other way to count currently. There is actually supposed to be a highlight/frame showing you how far your missile/spell will reach visually, and it will disappear when you hover your mouse outside the range, so counting is hypothetically unnecessary. It can be glitchy though.

You can scroll the terrain view by clicking the border frame so you can see where your spells and missiles are going, although there was a (recently fixed) bug making it problematic. I suggest using the newest version. Thanks for playing! :)

The latter, if not Sss-Thssss, might be an undead Slith from some of those crypt fights. A:EftP calls them Slith Avatars. The former is a GIFTS. Note the nail polish and pink hair bow. There's some debate about it due to the low resolution, but that's what it looks like to me. It might have been an early-development idea that wasn't used, since the GIFTS are instead presented as normal-looking but giant spiders, similar to other giant spiders except in personality, in finalized-game text descriptions.

It was a drake, not a dragon. Go ahead and check the ASR scenario file. The trees snd river are impassible. The only boats along that river are the two in Selathni on the bay which are not for sale. There is another encounter where you loot the corpse of a mage who died during flight. Jeff never said that about his intent while designing the scenarios. Please perform your own investigation if you don't want to take my word.

Reread what I said. There is no way to reach that spot without flight, but not every BoE party has to start with VoDT and then proceed to ASR. One can play At The Gallows first and then come back with Flight, overleveled and overpowered, to ASR, for example. BoE was designed this way on purpose, so it makes sense for its creator to add details like this. Scour the scenario file if you don't believe me.

There do not seem to be any boats for sale along that river, nor is the spell Flight available. There is no ford there, and the trees are impassible too. It looks like Jeff Vogel placed that special encounter there to reward players who enter the scenario already knowing the Flight spell. There's another encounter in the text dump I did, describing a mage who died flying over a mountain. It may just be that Jeff wanted to include little things to encourage players to take their parties between scenarios.

I have group therapy for the next 45 minutes but I'll have a look after if nobody gets to it first. Thanks for playing BoE!