The Almighty Doer of Stuff

This might help:

That is all.

The editor itself didn't actually tell you not to do it. You had to have read the manual carefully.

Minecraft features a system where all equipment will eventually break if you don't repair it by putting two damaged ones together. It also features arrows which, if they don't hit a mob, can be picked back up out of the ground/walls where they get stuck. I'm pretty sure Shining Force 1 and 2 for Sega Genesis feature arrows which are not consumable; you equip your elf with a bow and a single arrow, and you're good. Other implementation ideas: 1. Ordinary arrows are not consumable, but special arrows are. 2. All arrows are consumable, unless you get a matching Quiver equipment item. Rare, magical arrows might not have matching quivers, basically amounting to idea 1, and Returning arrows would not need a quiver.

Oh, OK.

I know Amazonian Saga, which I would be replaying if the game worked, features its own version of Summon Host. Archery is useless in all four Exile games in large part because there was originally no skill associated with improving it. Archery skill literally did nothing, because of a programming oversight that failed to attach any skills to the game mechanic. I'm pretty sure someone, at some point, fixed that, although if they did, or haven't and will, there'd be a legacy check to preserve balance with original-BoE scenarios.

Celtic Minstrel has added the ability for summoning items to be carried between scenarios, copying the mob data to the item itself, I believe. There is an item type to make readable items, but they only call a single two-message dialog, like most books in E3. You can't carry special node items between scenarios. I think I asked him once if he could allow only CERTAIN nodes to be taken and not others to prevent problems, but I think he said it was too difficult to program and troubleshoot to be worth it. EDIT: Oh, and custom graphics are copied to the item too, and so can be taken between scenarios.

I recall seeing something in the handbook's walkthrough about a bug regarding the Runed Stone and the gates. I can't remember what it was though.

There's food shops too, which are important until you get Major Manna or unless food is otherwise plentiful in the scenario. Boat shops are important. Horse shops are important in time-sensitive scenarios, although Celtic Minstrel is doing stuff with vehicles in general that could make them more flexible and/or important, if the author chooses. And a great thing about BoE is you can have other types of shops too. You can buy swords, spells, and healing in a single shop, for instance, without even needing separate dialogue nodes. And you could always include other sorts of items in shops, even in original BoE: Shops that sell powerful equipment, or items that you'll need for a special encounter later but that don't actually do anything on their own. (I hear Pyramids did this and kind of annoyed people who didn't catch on as to why the shop was selling a particular item at the beginning of the scenario, not having which would strand you midway through the scenario.) Using regular items can call special nodes now too, and you can design simple E3-style books that you can even take between scenarios, if you wanted. So have a magazine stand or a shop that sells comfy cushions that drive particular characters crazy and machines that go "Ping!" if you want. Or you could sell items that will magically transport you somewhere, but are used up, so you'll want to buy more than one. Or you could have a shop that sells ordinary, mundane garbage for obscene prices!

It's a problem because many, if not most, of the most popular scenarios do not actually take place in the Ermarian universe at all. I prepared as many trilogy-neutral descriptions as I could in anticipation that, should activity ever pick up again, that trend will continue. I wrote the descriptions with the actual audience of the software in mind; not the literary roots of the program, which are great but often irrelevant and sometimes important to ignore, depending on what story you're telling. Furthermore, depending on how much interest there is in the software once a stable release version is finished, there may possibly be many players and designers who had never even heard about Spidweb or Exile before finding this software, interested in making scenarios, but puzzled by all these references to games they've never played. It's GNU GPL 3.0 now, remember, so it really could go anywhere.

I do love Jeff's descriptions; Jeff is one of my favorite writers, which is why I'm trying to update and improve Bandit Busywork. Most of the scenario sucks but for the writing itself, as far as I can see, even his throwaways are gold. But even if you could get permission (and you probably couldn't because he doesn't seem to want to be bothered with this project, reacting with annoyance when we pester him, if he reacts at all) I'd still be picky. Like I said, many, if not most, E3 item descriptions are very "Exiley". I'm really not convinced it would be worth it.

BTW, Spiderweb Software DID NOT make the Exile III item descriptions available to the Blades of Exile project; only the stuff included in the BoE package was granted to us. That's one reason I wrote alternate item descriptions. Another is that many scenarios do not take place in the Exile universe, and references to cave food and such would make no sense in them, so I made universe-independent descriptions (except for items intrinsically tied to Exile, like Vahnatai weapons). I like most of them, CM doesn't like some of them I guess, but either way they'd be easily changeable by anyone who didn't like them. Changing them to non-free content like the E3 descriptions is playing with fire. If you want to have a look, I THINK this is it: http://www.almightywebsite.com/awos/boe/d/bladbase.boes

I believe Exceptional Strength also allows the PC to carry more weight.

You don't have to start over from scratch, I think. Towns reset after you visit, I believe, 4 other towns without returning to the one you want to reset. There's also a keyboard shortcut I can't remember.

I've never been captured by a video game character, although depending on who she is I might not mind...

There's not an option in Preferences for speeding up the game? There usually is. I don't know what "Cheat Engine" is but tinkering with a game with outside software has always been risky. I once lost my Pokemon Gold save trying to use a GameShark just to get then-unobtainable Mew and Celebi, and threw a hysterical fit. My family still teases me about it.

I think the next Spidweb game should have a character called the Infernal Spirit of Cruelty and Woe, who is not mentioned at all throughout the game but who swoops in at the ending and destroys the universe. It doesn't matter what path you take, you still get the exact same abrupt, surprise ending featuring the entire universe being incinerated, its ashes made into a decorative soap dish in the bathroom of the Spirit's home realm. No further mention is made of your goals or anyone else's from the time the Spirit appears just prior to what would be the plot branch's final fight.

I don't remember about any of the other games they appeared in, but there are recorded speech clips of Spider saying "Hi!" and "Hello!" in Blades of Exile.

People who film themselves giving hundred dollar bills to random homeless people on the street... I hate them. It's not just perverting supposed charity as a means of stroking your own ego and getting lots of YouTube strangers to say, "Wow, what a nice thing that person did!", but it's also using other, disadvantaged people as toys to achieve that end. I'm not going to say I don't want them to do it; $100 helps a lot when you're homeless, providing you don't have a habit (I never give money to people on the street but I will readily offer food or clothing if I can spare some and they need it), but that doesn't mean I can't hate the self-absorbed creeps.

Opinions differ on what "harm" is. Even saying "don't harm anyone" is ambiguous. Of course you can't just do whatever you want. "Oh, well it's MY definition of 'good' so it's OK." Well, that's fine, but if you feel bad doing a given thing to someone because you don't like making them suffer, then good, if not making them suffer is important to you, then don't do it. If you DON'T care about others' suffering, you can do it anyway but you can probably expect some consequences (grounding, detention, jail, being brutally bludgeoned to death, depending on the behavior), and if you don't like the consequences, don't do it. But for most people, simple empathy and a bit of wisdom are enough of a consequence for harmful behavior toward others, that people will refuse to do it.

It's hard to say what does and doesn't make a good person. People have debated for ages on the relative weights of thoughts vs. impulses vs. feelings vs. behaviors, in determining a person's "goodness". Ultimately, I've found, with help of my counselors and friends, that there's no such thing as a good person or a bad person. There's only people. From Jesus and Buddha, to Hitler and Dahmer, we're people. I like to think of Terry Bisson's short story, "They're Made of Meat". We are shambling piles of meat, complete with all the floppy psychobehavioral tendencies one would expect a being with a meat-brain to possess. Don't worry about being "good". Worry about whether you, yourself, are satisfied with what you're doing in life, and if you're not, feel free to change it.

Most of the graphics files in Spidweb games can be manually edited by anyone with a painting program. I'll just leave it at that.

I have Skype, I don't know about CM though. As I said, we tend to coordinate and communicate via the IRC chat. Here's the link: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=%23openboe You can also use your preferred IRC client if you don't like the web chat. Again, the link is found in the BoE forum header. I believe it's the last link on the list.

Good, we can use the help very much! Progress kind of stalled a while ago, and I'm still very busy. Right now what I'm busy with is whimpering in pain and discomfort, so I doubt I'll be of much help today... Maybe tomorrow or this weekend.

I don't know. I'm guessing CM was touching stuff while I was off dealing with real life and didn't test it on Windows. I know it was working at some point. I'll go poke him in the chat, which can be accessed by anyone via the link in the BoE forum header.