Avernum 2 Template

[Ishad Nha]

I have just produced a revised version of the A2 template scenario. I tend to think it is a bad idea, we need to concentrate more on wholly original settings but...

Currently it includes the entire A2 outdoors and only a few towns. I have not finished decrypting the entries in "town.dat".

I used a spreadsheet to handle the necessary translation work.

http://www.freewebs.com/ishadnha/A2Template.zip

[Celtic Minstrel]

Nice...

 

What's state 64 in the scenario script for?

 

As for the towns... ideally, all important plot-related stuff should be excluded from this. I'm not sure how to go about that though...

[Ishad Nha]

In Blades of Avernum you can't have a Recall Crystal because there is no suitable call. Call "move to new town" has all sorts of restrictions on it. In my port of River and Leaf I tried to find a way around this, I decided to create a special town that would exist only to send the party back to the start. (It would use move to new town to send them back to where they started the scenario.) See my post in the Lyceum, "Word of Recall spell v1.0". State 64 is the River and Leaf version of this idea.

 

Removing special states from the towns and outdoors of the scenario would remove most of the A2 plot - specific stuff.

 

I could spice up the northwest with zones imported from Avernum 1, I have a spreadsheet to convert that too.

[Celtic Minstrel]

Oh, silly me, I didn't notice the "set_state_continue(64)" line...

 

There are a lot of silly restrictions like that in the game.

[Ishad Nha]

There are a whole lot of restrictions in this area of BoA, the Recall Crystal won't work because you can only move (teleport) from one outdoor zone to another by use of a call in a town script. Move to new town is another example of this restrictiveness. Pity Jeff is busy with Geneforge 5, BoA really needs a rewrite.

[Nioca]

No. While it may be nice to have it revised somewhat, it does NOT need a full rewrite. Do you know what pains us BoAers would have to go through just to port the already released scenarios to the new system?

 

That said, a few additional calls wouldn't hurt.

[Celtic Minstrel]

Originally Posted By: Ishad Nha

Pity Jeff is busy with Geneforge 5, BoA really needs a rewrite.

It doesn't need a rewrite. A few tweaks here and there, but not a rewrite.

Releasing it as open source would be ideal. Didn't he say he might do that eventually?

[Nioca]

Yes, he did. But that's a long way off.

[Niemand]

There's more than one way to do a rewrite. Much could be added to allow freedom of design, without making it more difficult to design or breaking gameplay. Rather than altering the engine to mimic Geneforge or the newer Avernum games, consider using PNG graphics with alpha channels instead of PICTs and BMPs, custom sounds, or unrestricted use of move_to_new_town? I hunger for that code.

[John S]

Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel

Originally Posted By: Ishad Nha

Pity Jeff is busy with Geneforge 5, BoA really needs a rewrite.

It doesn't need a rewrite. A few tweaks here and there, but not a rewrite.

Releasing it as open source would be ideal. Didn't he say he might do that eventually?

That's what people said about BoE. The game's tweakable re-release hasn't exactly brought up a storm. Why would BoA do better?

[Niemand]

Actually, there has been a marked increase in attention to BoE.

[Celtic Minstrel]

Originally Posted By: John S

That's what people said about BoE. The game's tweakable re-release hasn't exactly brought up a storm. Why would BoA do better?

What's this about a storm? It doesn't really matter that the release of BoE hasn't led to much yet. It's the potential, I think, that makes the difference.

Or something...

[Dahak]

The reason I don't do much with BoE is that I've lost track of what changes have been made to the Mac version and where I get the latest. Still, if there is a compiled Intel version for 10.5 I'd be downloading it and playing it.

[Ishad Nha]

There seems to be one major list of terrain that is the same for all areas and then there are minor lists that vary from town to outdoors, or from town to town.

Ditto the strength of doors might vary from town to town.

 

(Edit, to make the above link actually work: click on it and you will be bounced back to the Spiderweb boards. Activate the address bar and then hit Enter, this should work.)

 

 

[Ishad Nha]

Fascinating: every town in Avernum 2 has the provision for 16 completely customizable terrain slots. There is a set list of 240 standard terrain types and then there are the 16 types that may vary from place to place.

[Celtic Minstrel]

Wow... that sounds incredibly useful...

[Ishad Nha]

Obviously it will require a massive rewrite of how BoA works, so we won't see it any time soon.

 

As for the Template, I forgot that in the outdoors, type 1 walls have a height of 2 while type 2 walls have a height of 1.

 

In Avernum 2 the game can create a boat outdoors because it deals with the boat record not the call create boat. The boat record has provision for outdoor coordinates unlike the call.

[Celtic Minstrel]

But if I recall, all the boats start in town anyway, which would explain why BoA cannot create a boat outdoors.

[Niemand]

Quote:

Every town in Avernum 2 has the provision for 16 completely customizable terrain slots. There is a set list of 240 standard terrain types and then there are the 16 types that may vary from place to place. . . . Obviously it will require a massive rewrite of how BoA works, so we won't see it any time soon.

As I mentioned somewhere else, I see no reason to allow town specific terrains for the same reason as not allowing town specific items. Replacing the current arrays for storing items and terrains with maps (say, std::map< short, terrain_type_type >) even continuing to use short ints for keys we could have 32000 terrains. That's enough for 320 totally unique terrains per town if one were so inclined. Furthermore the change is conceptually very simple, and though it would require many alterations of the game code, they would nearly all be handled by simple find-replace, replacing [] array accesses with calls to a wrapper function that uses map::find and checks the result to make sure that the requested terrain is defined.

[Ishad Nha]

As for my idea on July 8 of spicing up the blank parts of northwest Avernum 2, with zones imported from A1, I figured out a spreadsheet to convert Avernum 1 zones to a BoA scenario.

 

However the work won't be totally straightforward. Key terrain features like roads and walls won't line up properly, this will take some tweaking and prodding. (If the Empire can massively rearrange terrain why can't it just squish Avernum flat?)

[Ishad Nha]

While I am at it I have started an Avernum 1 Template, currently only the outdoors sections are done. The towns will require work on converting items and monsters. The current medium town spreadsheet is listed below, along with the bas file to date.

http://www.freewebs.com/ishadnha/A1MediumTownsDecryptor.zip

http://www.freewebs..../A1Template.zip

(To make the above links actually work: click on them and you will be bounced back to the Spiderweb boards. Activate the address bar and then hit Enter, this should work.)

 

Edit:

Mind Crystals require one scenario state for each type. They all use the same message initially but you can't just use the same scenario state for all of them. There is no call to tell the scenario script which number the crystal had on the list of items. (Unless you only allow the character to have one crystal in his inventory when he uses the crystal.)

 

I have made them single-charge items, if the player chooses not to use the crystal, "reward give(#)" has to be used just to ensure that the player still has such an item in his inventory. Better approach is to use take item(#), if the crystal is used.

[Ishad Nha]

I am continuing with the A2 Template, currently Formello is the only town that is done. Outdoor scripts need to be done too.

http://ishadnha.webs.com/A2Template.zip

[Ishad Nha]

Outdoor scripts were whipped up by a new editor function that featured a "for" clause using a preassigned set of zone names and script names.

(Code for this wasn't uploaded because I will be the only one using it.)

[Celtic Minstrel]

Basically, you hardcoded what you wanted into the editor?

[Niemand]

It's not an unreasonable thing to do; he needed to manipulate some data and he had a base of code that was already able to work with similar data. As he notes, he realizes that it was something that only he needed, and likely only need to use once, so he doesn't expect anyone else to want the modified code.

[Ishad Nha]

Yes I hardcoded it into my private copy of the Editor, the code won't be uploaded because it is of no use to anyone. I have a solution but there seems to be no problem for it to solve. Presumably designers won't normally need it. This is exactly the sort of diversity that an open source editor can provide.

I churned out the town scripts in the same way, it only took a few seconds to whip up 130 of them.

I could rig the BoE scenario import function to port most of the content of the towns of A2. It would open A2 Town.dat and port the towns, the outdoor zones are already done. This would require writing the A2 data structures into the Editor. Then the routine that determines which direction a wall faces won't be necessary, as A2 already has directional walls.

Edit:

Fine tuning would then require the inclusion of the custom terrain found in each town, if a town has it.

[Ishad Nha]

I have finished the decryption spreadsheet for large towns. The towns 1 thru 8 have been done. (Mild issue with W,E town entrances being switched.)

Mostly finished the medium town decryptor, thus was able to do Fort Draco.

[Ishad Nha]

Problems to be solved in bringing A2 features into BoA:

Wandering merchants in outdoor zones: make them a preset encounter that follows the roads. Call a state in the outdoor script that has "outdoor_enc_result(1);" in it.

 

 

Signs that do something, like announce and set coordinates for the Tower of Magi teleporter:

if they occur in town replace the signs with specobj.txt terrain scripts that set a given sdf.

If they occur outdoors, you can't use a terrain script of course. My solution is to retain the sign, then create a special encounter that announces what is on the obelisk, then sets the relevant flag.

[Ishad Nha]

All towns have been ported, the scripts have not been done that will take some time hence doorwheels and doorlevers only work in the first nine towns.

Ten of the towns are blank. Town 0, Nephilim Fortress was moved to an empty slot, it is a large size town.