icelizarrd

I still check here, albeit extremely rarely. I haven't done anything for about a year, though. If anyone wants, I could commit the hacked-together, incomplete Mac-Windows merge I was working on to a separate branch on the SVN, or something. The code's still pretty danged ugly, but it does compile and run on Windows--though loading and displaying scenarios isn't quite working properly. (Going outdoors doesn't really work at all, right now, and some of the text strings are messed up, for example.) I still haven't tested it on Mac yet--will doubtlessly need some adjustment to even compile.

Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel By the way, icelizarrd, how's your merging of the code-bases progressing? Or did it stall? It did kind of stall, regrettably. >_> Currently, though, I have the (I think) fully merged code running on Windows. You can make a new party and start it on a scenario, but loading and saving games doesn't work yet. And the outdoors terrain is completely screwed up: when you leave a town, you end up surrounded by cave walls no matter what the terrain is supposed to be. I'm thinking there's some silly offset or indexing problem there, since I had something similar happen with indoors terrain at first. (Or it has to do with loading the scenario improperly. Or I forgot to delete all the references to the older "terrain" arrays; that might explain why it loads cave walls.) I've just been too lazy to track it down. There are also some string issues: messages will display incorrect or empty strings, and some in-game character dialog is messed up. A few item/dialog icons don't display correctly. (Index issues again, I'm sure.) But, other than these bugs, most things seem to be working normally.

Having a means of recording that kind of the 6-paragraph dialog box is an excellent idea, in my opinion, and that's yet another of those little things that used to bug me about the previous Exile games. I don't know that I'll be able to do anything about it for a while, though.

Well that's super annoying, the site I used to host it (Stashbox) is apparently shutting down, as of pretty recently. Rotten timing. I could upload it again, but I can't imagine my version would be any better than Niemand's. For the record, I chopped off the excess tiles on the bottom of the image too, and it seemed to work just fine when I played through the beta test of Crusaders.

Originally Posted By: Niemand It's PICT format data, stored as a PICT resource. Huh. Well, weirdly, the .MEG file I got seemed to have a TIFF in it, somehow. I could open the resulting file in programs that can't handle PICTs, so go figure. But yes, looking at other .MEGs, they don't seem to be TIFFed. Thanks for the format link, anyhow. I may try to figure out a simple tool for Windows to mimic Graphic Adjuster's conversion ability, depending on how much work that ends up being. Originally Posted By: Ahbleza I've 'chopped' a lot of firewood in my time, but I wouldn't have any idea what type axe to use on a 'resource header'. ;^} Hahaha, I used a hex editor. Very crude, as I said.

Hrm, yea, the .exs is supposed to be platform-independent. Regarding .meg files, if I recall correctly, they're basically in TIFF format, but stuck inside the Mac resource fork as a "PICT" or something. (Corrections welcome.) When I was testing Crusaders, I crudely extracted the graphics by chopping out the resource header portion of the file, then opening it in a graphics editor, and that seemed to work. It had a bunch of extra garbage data on the end that needed to be cropped in the editor, however, and I don't really know enough about how the formats work to automate the process. ETA: Now that I try this again, I remember there are also some slight issues with transparency that have to be sorted out by hand.

Oh good! You're welcome, glad I could help. ETA: Oh, I'm a dork, I guess I can upload to the project page after all. It's now downloadable here, for future reference.

Yeah, I think passwords are silly too. But this doesn't change the updated Scenario Editor's file-loading abilities, it'll still open them while ignoring passwords. Now it just saves with a slightly different, more backward-compatible scenario format. I don't have admin privileges on the Google Code site, so I can't upload it there, but give this a try. (That's a direct link; alternatively, here's an indirect link if you prefer that for some reason: http://kiwi6.com/file/15h46y1878) (Alternatively download at the Google Code project page here: http://openexile.googlecode.com/files/BoE%20Scenario%20Editor%20PWF.exe) It's a very very simple change, but I do recommend making a backup copy or two of your scenario first, of course, just in case something horribly unforseen happens. Note that the scenario format is expected to change radically in the future, so eventually, using older editors probably won't be possible at all.

You're talking about the Windows editor, right? (If I recall correctly, the new Mac editor isn't functional at the moment.) It shouldn't be adding a password at all. But maybe that's the problem. I'll look at this in more detail when I get a chance, but it looks like the current Windows editor doesn't write anything for a password into the file (or rather, it writes whatever the uninitialized variable data will be--probably either a series of 0s or just random garbage values?). The Super Editor, I'm guessing, is expecting some data there that was encrypted using a password of "0", instead of whatever junk values are there now. Should be pretty easy to add that kind of functionality back into the code.

Alright! So, I had lost interest in the OBoE project for a little while there, but just tonight I finally got a unified ("cross platform") game codebase to run on Windows. It doesn't work yet—you can't load scenarios or saved games or play anything—but at least it's running without crashing, and the system-related UI (menus, preferences, dialog boxes) is working correctly. The code's messy as hell (yes, even messier now than before), and it'll take a while to even get the game near-functional; it's definitely not ready for anyone to experiment playing with the executable yet. But at least now I can actually do some real work on it instead of endless copy-pasting and RegExing. It won't compile on Mac yet: there were a number of places that I just left comments like "Todo: add Mac equivalent", and a few places where I changed things that the Mac code relied on. But fixing that should be comparatively easy, I hope, since I was adopting the Mac version's data structure approach to replace that of the Windows version. (I.e. there were more deep changes to the Windows code than to the Mac.) Anyway, in the meantime, I'll try to get the Windows copy functional-ish, and I'll start tinkering on a Mac once I've gotten somewhere with that.

I think you just use SVN to make a new directory, then check out the empty branch onto your own computer. That's what this link suggests, anyhow.

Once again, thanks for the input, everyone. Well, I checked back against the older copies of the code that Jeff has posted on the site, since I probably should have started comparing against them a long time ago. Not that it really matters, but it seems the Windows code did used to have the extra (loot == 4) check in return_treasure(). Probably just got lost during some other edit at some point, I know how that can happen. >_> I also looked up the extra +1 for Minor Manna, for fun. This doesn't matter either, but it was in the original Windows and missing in the original Mac code, the way it is now. Originally Posted By: Chokboyz The petrifying touch is indeed fixed, but with a twist : if the scenario played is legacy (that is almost all scenario out there), every monster template with petrifying touch is changed to disease touch. That way, the "vorpal cockroach" symdrom is avoided. Ahhh, I see. I was testing it using "legacy compatible" scenarios, of course, silly me. (I hadn't realized that was the default option in the Scenario Editor, or, actually, that the option was even there.) Good good.

I don't disagree that maintaining backwards compatibility is important. I've just been less convinced about the importance of the issues discussed in the last few threads, I suppose. But, you're right, I was never a part of the BoE community, and my experience playing it back in the day was comparatively limited. So I'm certainly willing to listen to contrary opinions; that's why I post asking for comments in the first place. At any rate, it is easier for me to not bother with any new fixes or features right now, since compatibil-izing the Mac and Windows code is its own special (lengthy) difficulty. So I'll put all of that aside until I (fingers crossed) have a working/mostly-working product.

I have many ideas about how to improve the scenario editor interface; but they will have to wait for quite some time, I'm afraid.

Hmm, fair enough; wasn't that a possible concern with Ogre/Giant Gauntlets too, though? And Petrifying Touch being Disease Touch? (The latter being possibly problematic was discussed before, indeed, but there doesn't seem to have been an outcry against that. If I recall, the decision was to import legacy scenarios as though "Disease Touch" was really "Petrifying Touch". Hmm, though now I also remember talk about doing that conversion for those monsters which had had "Disease Touch" in the older Bladebase, or something. That's still vulnerable to the possibility of someone having used it in their scenario for other custom monsters, however.) Anyway, I will leave it as-is for now.