>I don't know whether this qualifies as a Scenario Editor bug or not, but I >thought it worth mentioning, as it confounded me for some time. It seems >that you can't call the 'If-Then' node Type 135:Terrain this type? (Town) >directly from a dialogue response. For instance, you can't get a different >simple dialogue response to a question depending upon the state of >a given location's terrain. For instance, you can't simply have a prisoner >character respond to a question depending upon whether his door has been >unlocked or not. Apparently, a 'One-Shot Special' node type >must be called up first, and the node Type 135 called in response to the >player's response to a 'One Shot' dialogue. This really should work. I can't imagine why it wouldn't work this way, but I'll put a warning about it on the web site. ### >I'm creating a scenario, and when I create an encounter with the One-time >Place Town Enc. node, for some reason 3 creatures named "Empty" are >appearing in the encounter! I didn't place them there, that's for sure. >They have no points or stats, and appear as the "Dwarf w/ an ax" default >icon. > >At first I thought it was because one of the monsters I was placing in the >encounter was the last monster on the monster list (the last one I >created). But I created an additional monster after that one to test this, >and I'm still getting the Emptys! > >I've seen these in other scenarios created by other people as well, BTW. > >Anyone have any suggestions on how to get rid of these pesks? This sounds like, somehow, a little bit of the data in your scenario has become corrupted. A possible workaround is to call a special node upon entering elimiting all monsters of type Empty. I've never heard of anyone else having this problem. ### >1) Is there a way to make a town/dungeon that the Magic Map spell will >not work for? I have a couple of mazes that would be much better >without that info. No. >2) I also have a special item that I can't figure out how to get it to >work. It's a magic dust that controls a character in the game. It will >only work on one character (you must be in that town #). That character >then takes you to another town (Stairway). However, when the special >item is used, it gives the correct messages, but won't move the party. >I didn't think this was dialog, but it seems to be the same problem. Is >there a way to move the party to a new town by using a special item? I don't think that will work. >3) Last one. Stuff Done? It always seems to do the opposite of what I >expect. For example: A NPC gives the party info in a dialog that sets >SDF (1,5) to 1. Later, when a special called is Stuff Done? it checks >SDF (1,5). I get the wrong special if the party doesn't have that >info. They seemingly don't need to talk to that person. Do all SDF's >start at 0? Yes. ### >How can I let more than nine charakters talk in a new town? You put the characters in a different town, and place a character what their personality number in the original town. >And why horses or boats do not appear in the terrain? They appear in the game itself. ### I have been asked why I haven't made Blades open source, allowing other people to modify it. A few reasons: i. There is no way to fully prevent privacy, since this would involve making the registered version available for download. ii. There would be no way to synchronize the Mac and Windows versions. This may be a small issue for you, but it is extremely important to me. iii. It would interfers with my making Exile available for license to others at a later date, which is a possibility. iv. It would be a mess when I needed to upgrades Blades myself. v. It would inevitably get tech support and question E-mail sent back to me (user modifications always do this), picking away at my nonexistant free time. ### A very helpful E-mail ... Spiderweb Software, The page mentions that if you have a scenario design trick, send it in. Well, I don't know if this qualifies as a "trick," but here's a suggestion: Scenario builders, make sure your shopkeepers/trainers/healers/mayors/etc. cannot leave the building they're in. It's very annoying to have to close doors behind you lest they wander out where you can't find them. This can be done by making "monster blocker" floors in the three squares in front of a door, or extending a counter to span the whole room. Also, something else that's a bit annoying: Always assume that the player will be smarter than you think he/she is, and don't give such gigantic rewards for easy-to-find "secret areas." One example of this is finding a huge supply cache of alchemy ingredients (including three mandrakes) for walking into a room in an easy-to-beat dungeon, and only getting the resistance similar to half a dozen goblins and a goblin leader. Or getting Demonslayer for killing three Fire Lizards. And last, if you're stuck on what else to put in a town, then go back through Exile I, II, and III!! Jeff's created wonderful towns, so walk in and see what kind of things they have, spacing between buildings, size of rooms, etc. It can really help if you think a building looks awkward. That's all from me, put 'em up if you want, mostly I was just venting my frustrations due to a few scenarios that had these problems (other than the last, which was my own that I'd thought others might benefit from). ### >How can I let more than nine charakters talk in a new town? You put the characters in a different town, and place a character what their personality number in the original town. >And why horses or boats do not appear in the terrain? They appear in the game itself. ### >Came across this in a scenario I am polishing up. I have a time counter >which slowly drains the party of HP and spell points. The goal is to have >the counter exactly offset the rate at which these are normally recovered >(or at least to get close.) > >When I first set up the game I had two counters going (various reasons), >each firing every 150 turns, for an average of 1/75 turns. This worked for >my chars (Mac sys 7.5.5). In beta testing, all the beta testers have >complained that they are drained way fast. I have upped it to 1/150 and >1/200. The chars on my machine now recover points given time, while on >another machine (powermac G3, sys 8.5) still lose rapidly. This is true >even when we play the same chars in the same location in the game (i.e. my >beta tester was nice enough to send me the file to play with.) > >Is there an OS link to the counting rates? Do you know why this might be >happening? Can you advise as to the right drain rate to accomplish my goal? No, no, and around once every 40 turns. This is very weird behavior, perhaps related to some baroque incompatability between Blades and some implementations of some versions of some operating systems. This is really weird behavior. Someone's copy of Blades might be damaged. Brett Bixler comments ... I've no idea why this is happening to you, Ben. It's almost as if the speed of the system was interfering with what should be a turn-based counter. In other words, the speed of the machine shouldn't make any difference. 100 turns is 100 turns. In a related matter, I've noticed that counters I set sometimes seem as if they are not firing on a set interval. For example, if I set a global timer to fire every 100 moves, it seems like sometimes it fires at 80-85 moves, other times at 120-140 moves. I've never extensively tested this, because this is OK for what I'm doing. Brett Bixler Response: This would explain the situation. It is possible that there's a glitch which sometimes causes scenario counters to skip a beat occasionally. It is also possible that some upload of Blades somewhere has a corruption which has changed this code. I think that my basic source code is correct here. ### >1) When I went to change a town name from "17:" to "17: Castle Quarter" the >editor repeatedly would save the file and then crash. Subsequent openings led >to crashes (general faults). When I finally tried just "Castle Quarter" on an >older saved version (thank god) nothing went wrong. How could this be? Is the >editor perhaps sensitive to saving blocks of text that are too long? That >is, i >think I may have actually been changing "17: " to "17: >Castle Quarter ". Does that make sense? I'd >like to >keep the risk of future repeats low, as this obviously corrupts the file. I've never heard of anything like that. Your editor may have been corrupted, which would explain why reinstalling helped. >2) I wrote to you about a year ago with this problem, and it has recurred in >what might be a telling way. I have a city composed of 25 towns strung >together. I found that my party would often be sent in the opposite direction, >as though they were entering / leaving on the opposite side of a town from the >actual side. My solution was to keep the town entry / exits asymmetrical (and >switched to win95). This has worked. But I still find this can occur with >stairway specials. I have a tunnel entry (i.e., not an edge-of-town stairway >like the others) at something like (4, 32) with the town boundary at its max >setting. My party entered town from the opposite side, at (59, 32), via a >stairway, and immediately was told it faced this tunnel opening. So there does >seem to be some confusion of values along one axis, but the other axis seems >not to matter. I can't guarantee that, when the engine is pushed to the very limits of its capabilites, strange things won't happen. >3) I have a boat set in one town that I cannot edit. Regardless of how I >change >the settings, it stays there and stays non-property. How can I reset or work >around this, without just leaving it? This one really bugs me. Probably, if you restart the scenario, the changes will take place, but, once the scenario is begun and the boat is placed, later changes in the scenario itself won't affect the adventure already taking place. >4) I still am getting problems with graphics in playing one town: "no room for >graphic" in the small scrolling window, or once "Blades will show some terrain >as cave floor." I don't know if the first is a problem, but the second >definitely is. This used to happen when I had 16 megs of Ram and win 3.1. Why >still? What's the main thing to avoid doing to cause this in designing a town? >I really don't think I have overdone it. Is it the VARIETY of terrain? >should I >eliminate some terrains entirely, or limit myself to a certain # of >terrains? I >just need a general idea or guidelines. What's the limiting factor? Blades can only hold and keep track of like 130 icons at once. System memory is not a factor. ### >Jeff, the thing that I want to know how to do is what you did in the Valley >of Dying Things scenario. Remember in the library, how you have to put the >School book on the pedestal and the ghost thanks you for it? Well, how do you >make a special encounter occur when you place an item on certain terrain? I really can't take the time to explain all of these things, but if you open these scenarios with the editor, you can see how it's done. ### >I'm having trouble with custom graphics. I run ResEdit and copy my >picture's and make 4 different slots. When I put the ID number + 1000 >in the edit monster window my picture doesn't show up. Any ideas? It won't show up there. ### To Mariann - >Did Jeff name the town in Exile 3 after you? Yep. ### i am looking to diversify the ammount of choices a player has when picking characters.Ê I would have to put in new graphics and add to the list of races a player can choose from.Ê If that is not possible, then can i change the existing ones? No, and no. This is far too delicate, game-balance oriented, and fundamental an issue to be modified in scenarios. ### > Whenever a party changes towns via a stairway, if there is a special > node in the new town in the same coordinates as the stairway node of > the old town, then this special is called, even if the party's new > location is nowhere near there. Hmmm. An interesting quirk. Definitely watch out for this. ### I have been using the unregistered version of the scenario editor for a while now. (Not having the right currency to buy it.) I have found a mistake. In the Bitmap monster files there are two pictures for alien beasts- The alien beast and the pack leader but in the editor it only uses the pack leader for both. Why? And can I fix it? ÊÊÊ Brave Sir Robin Manually change the graphic when editing the monster. ### A few thoughts I wrote on why we're unlikely to do a major upgrade to Blades instead of writing a new game: Our avernum.com site should be up soon. We're working on it. The big problem with a Blades expansion is this: it would take months. First, to write it, then to test it, then to port the changes to the other platform, and then to test that. Then the releases, and the marketing. For all that time, we'd have to charge an upgrade fee, and to justify that fee, we'd need to design a big new scenario to go with it, which would take more months. As a business, we have to figure out if this is truly the best way to spend our time, as opposed to writing new games. The best way both in terms of profit, and in terms of personal fulfillment for me. It's really tough for me to not give people what they want. I am human, after all. But, in the end, I have to figure out the path that keeps me in this business for as long as possible, and which enables me to both make my house payments and avoid burnout. So that, in short, is why I have no plans for a major Blades expansion. However, the game I'm starting to design now (not Avernum) may have a publicly released scenario editor and a design contest. We'll see how it works out. Feel free to pass this on to the mailing list. ### >I have a custom cave graphic set to a town entrance. In the dialog >box for it, there is a place where you can enter the appropriate >graphic number for when the town is hidden. So, in the BoE code, I >hide the town. But, BoE refuses to change the graphic. I ended up >using a surrounding set of specials to keep the characters away from >the (still visible) cave entrance. Hmmm. When I used this feature, it basically worked. Have you tried restarting the scenario from the start (so everything gets refreshed and reloaded)? ### >Dear Spidweb, > > I am trying desperately to make a scenario but I can only do one outdoor >section. Once I'm finished with the first outdoor section and go to the >second and finish that and return to the main menu, all I've done on the >second is forgotten. Is there any way around this limitation? Save the scenario before loading a new section. The program can only remember changes in one section at a time. If this still doesn't work, redownload and reinstall the editor. It may be corrupted. ### >In the "create fields/monsters" list when editing monsters, there are about >five unused slots. Are these really unused, do they implement features >leftover from Exile III that are untested in Blades, or did you just leave >them there to make us think there was more to it? Those don't currently do anything at all. ### I have been asked why I haven't made Blades open source, allowing other people to modify it. A few reasons: i. There is no way to fully prevent privacy, since this would involve making the registered version available for download. ii. There would be no way to synchronize the Mac and Windows versions. This may be a small issue for you, but it is extremely important to me. iii. It would interfers with my making Exile available for license to others at a later date, which is a possibility. iv. It would be a mess when I needed to upgrades Blades myself. v. It would inevitably get tech support and question E-mail sent back to me (user modifications always do this), picking away at my nonexistant free time.