The Almighty Doer of Stuff

Jeff and Mariann are very good about answering emails. Their customer service quality is something they've always prided themselves on.

Oh, thanks. It's 3 meat shanks, by the way, says Slarty in this thread, and I recall that being accurate from previous playthroughs. Or playpartlythroughsandgetdistracted. I swear, this time I'll complete it! I beat Exile 1 and couldn't finish Exile 2, and got as far as Limoncelli's fortress where the difficulty took a sharp uptick and got frustrated. I got as far as the golems in Exile 3 and maybe Avernum 3 but couldn't beat them. The remake remakes have Casual Mode though!

Hi, could someone please edit the starting post to add the meat shanks and bag of sugar to the list? Thanks. I get confused every time I start over and look here, almost forgetting about those two quests.

The USA flag in particular uses particularly dark, muted shades of red and blue called Old Glory Red and Old Glory Blue. The other countries' flags tend to be a bit brighter IIRC.

Spiderlicious 2 and C&C both use roughly the same color scheme, but the shades are slightly different. Is one closer to the classic UBB scheme than the other? Anyway, I'm using C&C. It is swell. One thing I notice is on Spiderlicious 2, the text in the upper-right, with the notifications and profile options, are white on light gray. Not easy to read. C&C adds a red box behind it. Actually muted red, white, and muted blue are kinda Americaish. I'm pretty certain none of the themes use actual, official Old Glory Red and Old Glory Blue, but somehow the new themes remind me more of the American flag than the previous version did. Or maybe I just wasn't paying attention.

All I see there is "Privacy Policy". I'm guessing there's supposed to be a drop down box, but I don't see one, and there's nothing in my profile or account settings for themes either.

The Who's bassist was named John Entwistle, with no H in his last name. He made a solo album called "Whistle Rymes", named to poke fun at the constant misspelling. I have not yet encountered that character, but just worth noting. If you find any likely looking Rogers, Daltreys, Pete(r)s, Towns(h)ends, Keiths, or Moons, or any of their prominent characters from their songs, who are somehow connected to Entwhistle the Avernum character, that might make sense, but not sure why he'd only name someone after John specifically. Except one of his signature songs is "Boris the Spider", come to think of it. If there's any other link with that, that'd be something, but I would be surprised. I think I pointed out all these unlikely possibilities earlier in the thread too (there are towns named Moon and Port Townsend in E/A3 for example) but I think those were all dismissed as coincidences.

I'm pretty sure they granted the graphics to us under whatever license we need.

Oh, well then there's no issue I guess. What about Luz's, Tim's, and Milu's graphics that we picked out? Those would be GNU GPL 3.0+ as well.

I don't know. The cave floor changed to white, the walls became slightly less blue and changed shape, slightly different trees, rocks, and stone brick walls, totally different stone floor rune, and other stuff that seem like minor, unnecessary changes. Possibly the cave floors changed because in VoDT and ASR, there are caves which are not in Exile and therefore wouldn't have the glowing fungus. The rest, I don't know. We've included all of it in OBoE with Mr. Hunter's blessing, although as he points out it's really Spidweb's blessing we need, since the graphics were sold to Spidweb for a lump sum.

Yes, Save As... works though. Save not working we knew about, but it resets the boats...? Could you do one of those Github issue things, please? I'll point CM here, in the meantime.

Maybe this is simply put: If it's NOT in the original BoE source release, but it IS in the trilogy, it is NOT officially GPL. Otherwise, it's under GNU GPL 3.0+ and can be used.

The Exile Trilogy graphics that were included with Blades of Exile are available under GNU GPL 3.0+, along with BoE original graphics. The ones that weren't (blue-green cave floor, etc.) are entirely owned by Spiderweb Software, says the artist who made them, Andrew Hunter. Jeff has not gotten back to me on whether he wants to release them under the same license. I suspect Jeff doesn't like me as much as I like him and he doesn't seem to want to bother with BoE in general. You can try to email him if you want, or you can use the graphics included with BoE. The Open BoE project has a number of additional graphics (some by yours truly) under the same license. There's a pretty decent set to work with there, even without the Exile Trilogy-only graphics. Just be careful because we may or may have included the additional trilogy-only graphics (I forget if CM committed them to the current build yet) on more of an assumption that it's OK than an explicit permission.

There is at least one other, non-uranium item that causes chronic illness too. Uranium is usually the culprit, mind you. Check the flavor text of items by hovering over them in your inventory. Some of it isn't just silly jokes about sliths' lack of pants. If it looks fishy, it may be because it is fishy. Or radioactive, cursed, etc. There's a set of very silly items and equipment with bizarre traits and abilities in Avernum 3. Hopefully the upcoming remake will keep them or even make them more amusing than before. If they are, you'll definitely want to keep an eye out for strange abilities and stat effects.

Geneforge is all about that gray morality. If you help one good guy, another good guy dies. There's no real happy endings, heroes, or justice in the Geneforge series, so if that's what you care most about, look elsewhere. I know little about Avadon. I am given to believe it is also fairly gray-morality-based, but not nearly as much as Geneforge. I think there are mostly two main stories in each game, pro-Redbeard&co and anti-Redbeard&co, as opposed to a dozen endings in Geneforge, and it comes down to choosing who you sympathize with the most. But again, I have very, very limited Avadon knowledge and may be wrong. Beyond that I can't help you with that. I know little about Nethergate. I know the basic premise but have not actually played it or read many spoilers. You say you've played all the Avernum and Exile games. Does this include Blades of Avernum and Blades of Exile? I know BoE and BoA both have "The Valley of Dying Things" and "The Za-Khazi Run", which are fun adventures with people to connect with and save, and there are a number of user-made scenarios which meet that paradigm as well. Open BoE is free but doesn't really work properly at the moment. I know people are regaining interest in BoA with Chessrook's Let's Plays, and I believe due to its age it may be reasonably priced. If you want to try it, download the demo first, and make sure it actually runs on your computer. It's 13 years old. If it doesn't run properly there are probably tweaks others can advise you on performing, which will get it to run.

If there's a limit, it'd be many digits long. Effectively there's none either way. Same goes for items, monsters, towns... I think CM still put a hard limit on outdoor maps but I'm not sure.

Moving walls too. I don't know about number puzzles but CM has expressed interest in implementing the moving walls. He isn't sure how and I can't help him because I've never reached that point in E3 though.

If you're having success with the editor on Win10, Remington, I'm baffled. Maybe we can work together with CM to figure out why it's so borked for me. I'm on the development team but only in a non-programming role. My duties include testing, troubleshooting, and notably, improving Bandit Busywork without disrupting the integrity of Jeff's writing too much. I cannot improve Bandit Busywork if I can't make the scenario editor work though.

You can convert legacy scenarios to OBoE format with a menu option. It informs you of any specific changes you may need to make where OBoE broke compatibility with legacy scenarios, then you can accept and it will switch. CM has no problem running OBoE, including the scenario editor, on his Win7 computer, but I can't get the scenario to run for more than a couple minutes before crashing, and it's slow. The main program works better, especially after the recent bug fixes (if CM releases another build, you can enjoy those fixes) but OBoE is still in development in general, so there are bound to be some other bugs. There's probably a link in the forum header to where you can get it, IIRC. Also, check out http://www.OpenBoE.com/ . It has little that's not on the forum header at the moment though.

Ah, yes. The OBoE scenario editor is nearly unusable though, so I imagine Remington is using the legacy one. Legacy BoE did not offer the capability to do anything but dead, dust, stone, alive, not dust, and not stone, with Kill/Raise Dead. That's interesting though, I didn't know CM did that. I knew he made it flexible but I didn't know it resisted the Character Editor. EDIT: But wait, no, he must be using the new one. I know CM uses it without much trouble, but I can't use it at all. Well, I'm glad someone's using it. I do once again suggest a prefab party if you want to have special classes usable in certain situations, and I think I should also reiterate that forcing the player to use one PC isn't great. Perhaps just checking to see if they have more than one and booting them out otherwise? Like I said, any six-PC party is going to be balanced for six PCs and selecting one PC from a six-PC party will make the remaining PC useless, most likely.

Stairway nodes will take the party to another town. Also, we're not joking. There is an option in one of the dropdown menus in the character editor to "Reunite Party". It has always been there and you cannot stop it. If they're not just dead and they're not split, what are you doing to make that happen? If you're using the Split Party node, all you have to do is open the character editor, select that menu option, and save, and the party is reunited. If you're doing something else, you are probably exploiting some sort of bug which may not be wise. The character editor has always been very powerful, because one purpose for it is to rescue the party from glitchy scenarios.

I think of it as a cost-benefit analysis. But I wasn't so concerned about the reasons to allow or disallow overriding party composition, as the concept of punishing the player for losing or interfering with save-reload. I'm sorry that wasn't clear. But I'll try both anyway. Pros of forcibly restricting party composition: 1. Some players are not very bright and will disregard instructions without even knowing why they're doing it, and then they won't enjoy the game and won't understand why. (Sadly an actual concern...) 2. Some artists feel hurt when they lose absolute control over their work. Pros of not worrying about it: 2. Players who already know they enjoy a game more without certain restrictions, or like trying to break games after they've done it the recommended way, will not be able to enjoy the game as they like. 2. It's less work. 3. Strong, dedicated, loyal (and paying if it's a for-profit venture, which this is not) communities sometimes form around picking their favorite artists' work apart. Trying to squash this can be good for consistency of the product, but pushing too hard can also squash these communities before they grow. (See the What Goes On? Beatles Anomalies List or the "Five Nights At Freddies" wikis for examples.) ----- Pros of preventing the player from saving and reloading freely: If this is an arcade machine at Chuck E. Cheese's with a saved high score list for people to see their names, it can give glory to skilled players. This, however, is not an arcade machine. I personally see zero benefit to this. Feel free to insert one. Cons of preventing the player from saving and reloading freely: It's stressful and upsetting to spend hours and hours playing a game, until you sneezed and your little game dudes hit themselves with Divine Thud during the pitched final battle, and you either lost a lot of loot, EXP, etc. or worse, were forced to start over. Most modern games have been moving away from this since the late 1990s, and nowadays it's very uncommon for a game to actually punish their players. ----- Feel free to correct, add, or change anything. I'm curious. EDIT: (For clarification: I lose track of what I am saying, why I am saying it, and the general flow of conversation very easily. I'm not sure why the save/reload issue was still on my mind when it seems to have been settled many posts ago. I blame schizophrenia.)

What I'm saying is, there's an option in the character editor called "Reunite Party". You can't actually add new PCs in the legacy editor, but if they go in with a multi-PC party to start with, they can bring them back with the click of a mouse. You're fighting a battle that doesn't have to be fought. A player decides what does and doesn't ruin their own experience, not the designer. If a player can't experience it how they want, there's a good chance they won't experience it at all. But like I said, I think very, very few players will disregard the advice of the designer anyway, regarding party specifications. EDIT: Also, all you have to do is hit Shift+D and suddenly you can walk through walls and monsters can't attack, in OBoE anyway. I think in legacy you need to enter the scenario password, but most people can't run legacy BoE anymore, which is a large part of why we're working on OBoE in the first place.

If the items are in a barrel or crate and the barrel or crate is in a Saved Item Rectangle, the items will remain, although you may have to put the crate or barrel back where the items were if it resets to its prior location. The items will be there but you can't grab them until you make the tile a container by pushing one onto it. The character editor can be used at any point in the scenario or outside a scenario, not just at the beginning. They get their party split or killed, walk out of the special room, and just put them back. Simple. There's no such thing as cheating in a single player game. If your restriction isn't fun, they'll either "cheat" or stop playing. But I don't believe the majority choose to cheat. People rarely like doing things they know will break the game, and if they do it seems to be after an "honest" first playthrough. Just consider, does the restriction only make the game harder, or does it make it more fun? That's a decision to be made carefully for every feature of a game, not just stuff like this. It's good to keep in mind. The game will be 20 years old as of this December. 19+, not 18+. Boy, do I feel old. All the more reason not to waste my time with pointless restrictions. If you want to switch between PCs for different situations, a prefab party would allow you to give the player the characters the game is balanced for. The new scenario editor would, if it did not crash five minutes into using it every time, make some of this stuff easier. But it does crash so it's moot right now...

Refusing to allow players to revert to backups tends to irritate them if there's not a good reason for it. If it only adds difficulty without adding challenge or, more importantly, fun, then you may be wasting your time. I know I won't be playing your scenario if you do that, anyway. I don't game much these days but I've been told that starting around the late 1990s, a shift away from the "lives/continues" system began, and by this point, even the infamous "Game Over" screens are hard to find. As for forcing one-PC parties, I advise against that too. I'd just warn them in the Readme and the scenario intro text that the game is designed for single-PC parties and that the game may not function well or be properly balanced if they do otherwise. If they really want to play with multiple PCs, they'll just go through your check and then reunite the party or add more PCs, using the character editor. Besides, if you have a 6-PC party, the party will be balanced for that. A one-PC party has special balancing requirements, and if you just kill five PCs, the remaining PC probably won't be balanced to play any challenging scenario. They can play "Terror from the Park" I guess. If you want you can even include a prefabricated party. Make a party the way you like it and package it with the scenario. You still can't force the player to use it, but it's the player's own fault if they disregard instructions and don't get an ideal play experience.