Questions from 2/14/98-3/20/98 1. First, the one-shot Display Message special displays its message every time its space is stepped on. How do I get a message to display only the first time the special is called? Do I have to use a stuff-done flag? Yes. 2. The Change Boat Ownership special doesn't seem to work at all. Has anyone else mentioned this? Right now I'm working around this by blocking access to the boat until a stuff-done flag is tripped. I'll look into this. 3. One last question: the "move party to outdoors" town special allows a party to be moved to any outdoor section, but as far as I can tell the "move party" outdoor special only allows the party to be moved within the same outdoor section. Is there a way for a party outdoors to be moved from one outdoor section to another, or do they have to be in a town? The only way to throw a party from one outdoor section to another is while they're in a town. 4. I am starting work on a Blades scenario that will involve custom outdoor terrain. I have run into problems with editing terrain types and then editing outdoor terrain. I chose custom graphics for grass plus all of the water tiles that run up against water (so I could draw desert islands). When I do this, it seems to break the auto-cleanup in the terrain editor for painting in water. Instead of putting in the appropriate tiles it puts in the same tile over and over again. If instead I draw my terrain and then edit the terrain types, the terrain looks fine... so all of the custom graphics are getting correctly mapped onto the terrain code #s. I think the problem must be with how the editor automatically fixes water edges... somehow it's getting locked into always painting the same terrain type no matter what. It behaves the same in towns as outdoors. Answer: This is an odd phenomenon, and not one I've heard about before. In general, leaving the terrain types that get automatically altered (water, mountains, cave walls) alone as much as possible is a good idea. Changing the graphic number itself shouldn't cause any problems, but I'll look into this. There might be a bug. In the meantime, stick with your workaround. Draw the stuff as normal terrain, and then, before release, put int he custom graphics numbers. This should hold you until I come up with a fix. 5. I was just wondering - are we allowed to include modified Blades of Exile graphics in our scenario's custom graphics files? What about graphics from previous Exile titles? Sure, and sure. Just don't use these graphics in your own non-Exile games. While you're at it, you can use Exile graphics on your Exile web site, as long as you include on the page "Exile graphics are copyright 1994-1998, Spiderweb Software, Inc., all rights reserved." 6. If I rearrange the order of the items in the predefined item list, will that cause the inventory of characters who are brought into the scenario to be changed because the item numbers for various items differ? No, but good thinking. The starting items are hard coded into the program itself. 7. When dealing with outdoor areas, does area 0,0 have to be in the top left or can you arrange them differently? (0,0) is always top left. You can't remap the coordinates. 8. In the Blades of Exile editor , how can I make a Soul Crystal like the one in Exile 3 ? Nope ... the party is assumed to already start with a Soul Crystal. They can automatically cast Capture Soul, etc. 9. Is there any way to get it so that when a character casts a spell, it damages the party? Nope. 10. Is it possible to simply swap the position of 2 items in the Edit Items list? If not, this would be an extremely useful feature to add, especially for designing custom selling lists, and for adding items that use custom graphics. Just the hard way ... rewriting the items. 11. There doesn't seem to be any way to remove a special ability from an item once it is given one... Sure there is, in the Edit Special Items window. 12. Are piercing crystals supposed to group together like they did in Exile 3, or is this something you changed for BoE? Read the bugs area in the Scenario Workshop. Some of the Macintosh bugs may still be relevant. 13. Would it be possible for you to give us more possible terrain types? The 256 can be somewhat limiting, especially when the first 90 can't be changed. Afraid not. 256 is a pretty serious limit. A byte only represents 256 different values. 14. I'm also having troubles with my game files getting corrupted whenever I try to Delete Last Town, and then make another town over it. For some reason it also complains about a false password, even though the scenario wasn't password protected. I am using the Windows version. This is, indeed, a serious bug in the Windows Scenario Editor version 1.0. There is a workaround. Whenever you create a new town in the Windows scenario editor, ALWAYS save the scenario just before and just after making the new town. Then you won't have any problems. Hope to have an upgrade available soon. If you've already been stuck with this bug ... First, back up the scenario. Then use the Delete Last Town feature repeatedly, saveing after each time, until all of the towns in the scenario are correct and uncorrupted. Let me know if you have any trouble with this. 15. when editing the graphics of items, how much space is actually used? When I try to use all of it, I have items that, when placed next to a wall or something similar, they appear to be partially inside the wall. Read the Custom Graphics chapter in the docs. The base graphic size is 28x36. Each row should have 10 28x36 graphics, one after the other. Items should be positioned in the middle of the 28x36 rectangle. Dialog and dialogue graphics need to be spread over 2 consecutive spaces. 16. I need to have a town with 11 people in it. There's no way around it. I cut all the people I could. The extra 11th person (a vagrant Vahnatai) gets moved to a different town later when a special gets triggered. Can I list him as belonging to a different town and just incidently put him in this town? This is mentioned in the documentation. You can put a personality from a different town into a town. You can put personality 117 (in town 12) into town 4, for example. 17. Right now the story is that he's avenging the death of Erika Redmark and in order to stop him you have to bring her back in the form of a Crystal Soul. The question is -- am I allowed to do this? Is Erika an untouchable NPC? Erika is dead. I dunno - I, personally, for the sake of the story, would prefer she stay dead. While using characters from the games is cool, people should probably think twice about doing major things to them (like killing them or bringing them back to life), because other people will be wanting use of those characters in their scenarios. 18. So I went and threw in the Friendly Spiders and made them Depressed. I did it too well and it makes my previewers cry. That defeats the point of this very silly scenario! Should I mess it up so it's not so good? Should I do something else entirely? Should I get new previewers? Even friendly spiders have bad days. The spiders have often been depressed in the Exile games, like when the aranea took their eggs, for example. I don't see why this should be a problem. Of course, on the other hand, when all your testers really hate something, it's often worth rethinking. 19. Would you be mad if I have major NPCs named Mully and Sculder and a friendly alien beast named "QueeQuag"? I COULD always name the alien beast "Pooky" if there's a problem. (grin) Having named the casts of entire towns after characters from TV shows, I can't see how I could object. 20. Why Cant I Play My Sinreoes On My Copy Of Boe ( Unregistered) It needs to be registered. 21. I regret to say I think I have found a bug in the Windows scenario editor. I am making a scenario with over 10 towns; when I built #11, it messed up. The town named changed to "yyyy", except with dots over the "y"s. In the terrain, it showed no town boundarys, all entrances were in the upper left corner, and there were walls and conveyor belts in a zig-zag pattern all over. This is, indeed, a serious bug in the Windows Scenario Editor version 1.0. There is a workaround. Whenever you create a new town in the Windows scenario editor, ALWAYS save the scenario just before and just after making the new town. Then you won't have any problems. Hope to have an upgrade available soon. If you've already been stuck with this bug ... First, back up the scenario. Then use the Delete Last Town feature repeatedly, saveing after each time, until all of the towns in the scenario are correct and uncorrupted. Let me know if you have any trouble with this. 22. I have noticed that you can't use dialogue pictures in a 1-shot dissplay message node...I had to take a picture from your dialogue picture sheet and put it in my custom sheet then I used a 1-shot message(terrain) and set 1000 as the picture, can you make it so I don't have too? Or can you anyway and I'm just too stupid to find out how? This is how you do it. If you want a dialogue face in a dialog box, make a custom graphic sheet and copy the facial graphic into it. 23. This is prob'ly a stupid question, but is there any way that you can get all yer items taken away, then get them back at a later time? Nope. 24. Any chance of your putting Exile I, II, or III on BOE (or someone else who you think can do it)? Nope. 25. When you press the tilde key, it displays a distorted monster PICT in the terrain window. Is it supposed to do that? Why? In the game? This is a debugging tool, so I can find out what's going on in memory. 26. When I try to run Busywork Bandits, it gives me two standard 'scenario screwup' messages, one with error 35, one with 36. Then BOE quits because of error type 2. What gives? The first upload of this was corrupted. Try it again. 27. I forgot to mention that I'm having trouble getting a monster to drop an item when it dies - I have the item (#383) set to drop 100% of the time, but when I run through the scenario, it doesn't drop it. Monsters don't drop treasure in debug mode. 28. I'm having problems with my copy of Blades of Exile. For some reason, all monsters have exactly 4X the health (hit points) they are supposed to have. And also have an extra attack (If "Attack 1 number of dice"=2 normally, it will now have 3). I'm wondering if this is a known bug in the game. Or if I've done something wrong. When you play a low difficulty scenario with a high level party, the monsters become stronger. Scenario designers should always make sure to set their scenario difficulty at an appropriate level. 29. You mention for the design contest no EXPLICIT sexual content....please define Explicit for me. I mean, would it be ok to have a bordello in yopur town.  You can't see them naked and can't get it.; Also, would it be bad if almost everyone responds to the word rape. You can't actually complete this task. All they do when you ask about rape is run away and the town gets angrey at you. Well, sometimes they don't get angrey....depends on the character..... This sounds like an R rated scenario. There's nothing inherently wrong with this. Things can be adult. Just try not to go out and offend people. As always, try to use some common sense. Imagine what it would be like for someone else to play it. Show it to other people. Common sense, sometimes, is our only real weapon. 30. I only have one gripe with the scenario editor. When you place anything except terrain, you have to click on the button again, which really sucks. The documentation does list keyboard shortcuts. , - edit monster ~ - place same monster .. - edit item / - place same item I use these all the time. 31. You either have the above graphics (i.e. white castle etc.) or the below graphics (i.e. yellow castle etc.). Is there any way to get both? 'Cuz I haven't found anything on it in the docs. Edit a different terrain type and turn it into the desired sort of castle. 32. You are going to produce more scenarios for BOE, right? Because all the ones I've played so far really kinda suck. Beyond Bandit Busywork? Doubtful. We're working hard on Nethergate. But be patient ... the custom scenarios are getting better. 33. Is it possible, with the scenario editor, to make things like the slime pools in Exile III? Afraid not. There's no way to hook a special node into casting a fireball or similar spell. 34. I have BoE, and can't seem to figure out how to make shopkeepers, and how to modify their wares. Could you please assist? Open Blades of Exile Base (BLADBASE.EXS in Windows). Look in Warrior's Grove. There's several excellent examples of shops in there. 35. What's the difference between "change terrain" and "transform terrain"? I couldn't figure it out from the docs. Thanks. Every terrain type has a Transform To value. When you use a Change Terrain special flag, it changes a terrain type to a type you select in the special node. When you use a Transform Terrain special flag, it changes a terrain type to the Transform To type set in the terrain type itself. Go into editing terrain types if you want to see what the Transform To values are. 36. Just a quick question about the stuff done flags. I understand the whole thing about there being a grid of values that you can change with specials. What I don't get is why there are so many values for a stuff done flag. Does it make a difference if a stuff done flag is set to five as opposed to eight? I mean if you've found a sword or something that's it isn't it,1=found, 0=not found. There are usually only 3 values for a Stuff Done flag: 0, 1, and 250. 0 usually means not done, 1 means done, and 250 also means done and is used by One-Shot special nodes. Other values might be used, but usually not. 37. I can keep track of the flags if it's just zero or one, but how do you keep track of dozens of them each with two hundred and fiftyone possible values? Did I misread something or is the rest of the world just smarter than me? Take notes. Lots of notes. If flag (0,3) is 0 if the treasure was taken and non-zero otherwise, write that down on a piece of paper. It's the only way to keep things straight.