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Just curious, does anyone know anything about the development team responsible for the original Geneforge game? I don't necessarily need names, just the amount of people who worked on it.

Hi! I'm ADoS, a long-time Blades of Exile player and designer. I'm helping Celtic Minstrel with the development of the Open Blades of Exile project. Specifically, he does all the programming, creative direction, decision making, project maintenance, etc. (the hard part) and I do testing of various kinds, troubleshooting, some graphics work, provide suggestions and ideas, and assorted other miscellany that doesn't involve programming (I don't know how). Blades of Exile, for those who don't know, is a small software suite that allows you to design and share your own adventures in the game engine of Spiderweb Software's award-winning Exile trilogy (which was later remade into Avernum), utilizing an intuitive, easy-to-use point-and-click system. No coding required, just enter text and numbers, push buttons, and paint the maps, basically. Some amazing stories were told with this system and the community was very creative, with annual general design contests as well as occasional themed contests. Spiderweb Software included three short adventures with the package, and there are over 300 user-made scenarios to download and play. The program had some annoying and often pointless limitations, but with ingenuity we managed to get around many of them. Now that the software is available under the GNU GPL 3.0, Celtic Minstrel has removed or fixed many of the limitations, loosened many others, and fixed many, many bugs. It now runs on newer operating systems as well. Part of the design philosophy of this project is to keep the look, feel, and play of this software more or less the same, and just fix bugs, add a few spare unobtrusive features, and make sure it runs correctly. There was a short-lived Swords of Exile project, for example, where someone was trying to overhaul the whole thing so it was unrecognizable. That's what we're trying not to do. We insist that all legacy scenarios must continue to play as intended. We think it will be great when it's finished, and we hope the community will reignite. Unfortunately there is still a good amount of work to do. BoE was a passion of mine for a huge chunk of my life and I don't want to see it wither away, but it can be frustrating sometimes when we don't know who or how many we're working to please. It would be good to know how much interest there is in this project, as well as whether anyone would like to help out more actively. CM would especially like another programmer to help him. So could you take a minute and answer this poll? Thanks! (I'm posting this in the General forum because I suspect there are many people who don't scroll all the way down the forum list.)

I'm currently building a quest system based on ideas from Exile 3 jobs as well as some input from BoA quests. Currently I have the following done or planned: The quest structure contains a name and description, an optional deadline, and an optional XP/gold award; I realize rewards can be done via special nodes, but it didn't seem like a terrible idea to just make it a bit more convenient. The quest deadline can be absolute (must be done by day X) or relative (must be completed X days after starting it). Thus, the party structure keeps track of the day each quest was started as well as the quest's current status (which is one of available, started, completed, or failed). Of course, there'll be a special node to set quest status, and one to check quest status. It'll be able to set/test for any of the four statuses. A job board talk node, which runs through a specified subset of the quest list and picks four quests at random that have the "available" status, and offers those to the player. Thus, setting a quest's status to "available" could make it repeatable. Placed creatures in town can set a special node to be called when you attempt to talk to them. This is called before conversation starts and may be able to prevent conversation starting. It also works on hostile monsters (where normal conversation doesn't happen). I want to somehow have a way for job dispatchers to be angered if you keep failing the quests they give you, so for quests obtained from job boards there will be a way to track who gave you the quest. Any thoughts on this? Or additional suggestions? Even without input, this design may continue to evolve as I go about implementing it.

Link (~2.711 MiB). This installer includes the three original SW scenarios (VoDT, ASR, and ZKR) as well as Bandit Busywork. The installer will create three shortcuts to the programs on the Desktop as well as a Start Menu entry with the three shortcuts as well as a link to the scenarios folder and an uninstaller link. This installer was built using NSIS and built using a Windows XP box. The actual binaries were cross-compiled to Win32 using the MinGW32-nightly makefiles (available in the svn). Although this is marked as an alpha, I have been using binaries compiled from trunk for several months now and I haven't had any issues whatsoever. Caution should still be exercised, however. Back up your stuff before use! Please report any issues or suggestions with this installer or these binaries to this thread. Happy playing!