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A new remake in Blades of Avernum Editor
Niemand
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Member # 5576
 written Wednesday, January 10 2007 13:04 Profile Homepage #39
quote:
Why don't you just make the editor display ed_icon_adjust properly? That would mean that you could tell what you were seeing in 2D mode, and you could also reflect the game accurately.
Like I said before, it does already! However, a quick search of my BoA folder locates only 16 terrains and 1 floor which were defined using ed_icon_adjust (in the basic game files and 25 scenarios). So, it's convenient to be able to view terrains and floors with their simplistic adjusts instead of having to rewrite all of their definitions.

quote:
Call it that! I want to be in the 3D editor! It will ensure my infamy forever!
I did. :P (I called it Kelandon's Strict 2D Icon Adjusts, to be precise). And if anyone asks, you made me do it!

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Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00
A new remake in Blades of Avernum Editor
Niemand
Infiltrator
Member # 5576
 written Wednesday, January 10 2007 09:49 Profile Homepage #37
Ok, compromise: I'll give you a toggle-able option to turn off the additional adjusting behavior. You can turn it off and leave it off, and I will turn it on and leave it on, because I can't stand not being able to tell what I'm seeing in 2D mode. I'm assuming that, though it was included in the quote, adjusting the graphics of creatures and items in 2D mode is not being called a bad idea.
And it will take some will power not to name the new menu item "Kelandon's 2D Icon Adjust Toggle".

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Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00
A new remake in Blades of Avernum Editor
Niemand
Infiltrator
Member # 5576
 written Wednesday, January 10 2007 07:10 Profile Homepage #35
Apologies for this being a double post, but I wanted to make it clear that there's something new here:

I believe that the time has come to beta test the new Mac version of the editor, so i could use a few volunteers. Names and email addresses would be logical, and knowing which OS version you plan to test it under would be nice.

Lastly, the final feature I've worked on is fixing icon adjusts in 2D mode. It turns out that the editor already did use te/fl_ed_icon_adjust, just hardly anyone was bothering to use these properties. So, what the editor now does is if a floor or terrain has no ed_icon_adjust but does have an ordinary icon_adjust, the ordinary adjust is shown in 2D mode. This fixed the appearance of blue carpet, for instance. Also, items and creatures are now adjusted when displayed in 2D mode.

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Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00
Anagrams in General
Niemand
Infiltrator
Member # 5576
 written Monday, January 8 2007 20:03 Profile Homepage #7
I quite liked several of the results I got for my full name:
SIR CHEERER VOWS A PLINTH
A THORN PERCEIVES WHIRLS
A(n) SSH RECEIVER PRINTS OWL

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Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00
Scenario Contest Final Results in Blades of Avernum
Niemand
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Member # 5576
 written Monday, January 8 2007 19:59 Profile Homepage #7
Congratulations to all of you who participated! This contest line-up contained a lot of great work.

And here I am having yet to officially finish a single scenario. . . grumble, grumble, etc. That'll all change soon though.

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Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00
A new remake in Blades of Avernum Editor
Niemand
Infiltrator
Member # 5576
 written Monday, January 8 2007 19:52 Profile Homepage #34
Fear not! I'm aiming to begin a Mac beta test later this week.
As features go, I realized just how much I could do with a list of zone names. As a result, I've torn apart and rebuilt the import system so that now the user can see a list of the names of zones in the source scenario to alleviate having to guess numbers blindly. Also, importing a town now prompts for a file, then a town number, rather than the other way around. I think that I've been able to relax the restriction on importing a town only over one of the same size, but I will need the help of testers to determine if I really got it right.

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Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00
A new remake in Blades of Avernum Editor
Niemand
Infiltrator
Member # 5576
 written Monday, January 8 2007 10:20 Profile Homepage #32
Way ahead of you *i. I've got a menu item that toggles the sounds on and off, and stores the setting in the preferences. I've also fixed it so that the cursor starts out at the end of the text field in dialogs, and the script a placed creature will use is shown, even if it's the default script for that creature type.
Right now I'm trying to make the 'load different town' and 'load different outdoor section' dialogs allow the user to select the zone from a list showing the towns' or sections' names. After that I want to try to get graphic adjusts working in all viewing modes, and try to make the scroll bar on the right side respond to scroll wheel input.

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Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00
A new remake in Blades of Avernum Editor
Niemand
Infiltrator
Member # 5576
 written Sunday, January 7 2007 09:07 Profile Homepage #26
(Bump)
So I now have the copy and paste functions working, including the choices to paste any combination of the copied rectangle's floors, terrains, and heights. (That is, you can paste just the floor, or just the terrains and heights, etc.) i've also fixed the bug where the editor would try to treat some floors as signs.

I'm also making good progress on a feature that I had hoped to add, but hadn't wanted to get people's hopes up about in case I couldn't do it. It appears I can do it, and that feature is: unlimited undo and redo for drawing operations! So far it works with the pencil, paintbrush, paint-bucket, spray-can and rectangle drawing tools, and before long it should work with all of the others and heights as well. No more having to reopen the .bas file to get rid of a change you didn't want to make!

Also, once I'm back at school in another week or so I can begin work on updating the windows version as well.

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Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00
Stuck in Exodus in Blades of Avernum
Niemand
Infiltrator
Member # 5576
 written Monday, January 1 2007 20:39 Profile Homepage #48
quote:
Oh, and I summoned Phaedra with Summon Shade.
That's not a bug, it's a feature!
IMAGE(http://hallsofchaos.forinti.com/misc/army.png)
And besides, summon shade is so broken that there's no way to escape having it summon some things it's not supposed to.

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Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00
Problem in Exporting Exodus Items in Blades of Avernum
Niemand
Infiltrator
Member # 5576
 written Monday, January 1 2007 16:57 Profile Homepage #7
Yes, I think that's the idea, although some stackables are not included, notably the enchanted projectiles like acid bolts, arrows of light, and bolts of life.

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Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00
Problem in Exporting Exodus Items in Blades of Avernum
Niemand
Infiltrator
Member # 5576
 written Monday, January 1 2007 13:11 Profile Homepage #5
quote:

From the BoA Editor Docs:
Constant Item Types You should be careful about editing the default item types, as many creatures give them as rewards. In addition, some of the default item types must be left alone. The game expects them to be unchanged from scenario to scenario. They are:
Food – Items 4 to 12 and 397 to 400.
Javelins, Arrows, Bolts - Items 84 to 88 and 99 to 108.
Alchemy Ingredients, Basic Potions, Scrolls - Items 214 to 263. All the Tools - Items 171 to 178.
Crystals and Dust - Items 326 to 329 and 435 to 439.
This is probably whats happening. Most default items can be overwritten no problem, because once the party has an item, all of it's data is stored, so it doesn't matter if an item of type19 that the party has is not the same as an item of type 19 in the current scenario. (Though this can be annoying.) These items are more special, so designers should generally avoid messing with them.

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Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00
1/10 discussion... in Blades of Avernum
Niemand
Infiltrator
Member # 5576
 written Saturday, December 30 2006 20:06 Profile Homepage #12
I would say that we aren't in too much danger of seeing a scenario that completely rewrites one zone to be two different towns; keep in mind that a script redrawing the town would not be able to move special rectangles, terrain scripts, or area descriptions. Even if a designer made two sets of special rectangles and terrain scripts both in the same zone, one set of which is dormant at any given time, it would take the designing to a whole new level of difficulty, and I think likely make it totally prohibitive. Besides, I agree with Lazarus that this would be totally out of the spirit of the short contest. In any case, anyone who wants to make a large scenario can enter it in another contest.

Aside from this theoretical discussion, I think that I will have an entry for this contents, Stairway, which stands at 3 towns and may grow slightly.

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Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00
A new remake in Blades of Avernum Editor
Niemand
Infiltrator
Member # 5576
 written Thursday, December 21 2006 17:16 Profile Homepage #23
quote:
f you have a type 215 terrain that is a sign the Editor will always treat type 215 floors as being signs! It will go through the whole rigmarole of asking for the text of the sign&&. Of course the party won't be able to use the "sign" in the game.
Oh, you mean this is a bug that should be removed, not a feature you want added! My apologies. I think I can fix it.

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Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00
December Blades Chat? in Blades of Avernum
Niemand
Infiltrator
Member # 5576
 written Thursday, December 21 2006 09:25 Profile Homepage #4
I would try to attend such a chat.

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Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00
A new remake in Blades of Avernum Editor
Niemand
Infiltrator
Member # 5576
 written Thursday, December 21 2006 08:38 Profile Homepage #20
So I have the eyedropper and paint-bucket tools working now. Next I need to put into action my plan to fit in more buttons. One question: what kind of icon for the copy and paste buttons would make sense?

Lastly, I agree with *i and others who have said similar things that an IDE type program would be a big improvement over the system we have now. I've been thinking a bit about this, and I think I might be able to make a good attempt at such a thing, but not right now. One problem is that The 3D Editor is Carbon-C++, Dialogue Editor is pure Java, Alint is Cocoa-C++ (if I remember right), Graphic Adjuster is Carbon-C, and so on. They would basically all have to be recreated in a single application, particularly since Carbon is. . . not so good. Maybe next summer when I have some more time I'll give it a try. For now, I just want to patch up the existing 3D editor to max-out its potential.

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Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00
A new remake in Blades of Avernum Editor
Niemand
Infiltrator
Member # 5576
 written Wednesday, December 20 2006 05:14 Profile Homepage #14
So here are the revamped button arrangements as I've though of them so far.

quote:
Originally written by Ishad Nha
a rectangular application of the Blocked property, you would not need blocked varieties of floor. Currently floor and terrain types can be applied by hollow or full rectangles, something like that is needed for the Blocked property.
There is a limit to how many blocked spaces can be placed using that tool. If you need a lot of blocked spaces, you really should use a blocked floor.
quote:
Could support the functions fl_ed_icon_adjust and te_ed_icon_adjust. I suspect they are meant to show the icon adjustment in the 2-D display.
To the best of my knowledge there re no fl_ed_icon_adjust and te_ed_icon_adjust attributes. I am however, trying to figure out how to make the editor correctly display icon adjusts in 2D mode.
quote:
Creature default script is not implemented in the editor. (It is not automatically assigned to creatures having that script.)
This isn't something the editor handles. Leaving a creature set to use its default script means that when you play the game it will use whatever default script is set for it in [scenario]data.txt. The editor just doesn't bother to check and display which script this is.
quote:
Floor terrains will be “signs” if they have the same number as a terrain type that is a sign.
A floor cannot be a sign. Besides, there isn't a one-to-one correspondence between floors and terrains; there can be 512 terrains but only 256 floors.

[quote=Spent Salmon
An "open script" button. Not sure how easy it would be to implement, but it would make life much easier in so many ways. It should just open whatever script(s) are associated with a given floor/terrain/creature, and ignore blue rectangles.[/quote]I have had something a bit like this in mind; my idea was to make a system a bit like Javadoc or similar where the writer of a script places specially formatted comments at the beginning of the file, and the editor would read these so that in the 'Edit This Creature' dialog it could display a snippet about what the script does and what each memory cell is for. This would be a lot of work to make though, so I won't be attempting it just yet.

Lastly, I want to point out that I can only recompile and readily alter the Mac Editor. I will keep track of what I do though so that the same can be done with the Windows Editor.

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//hallsofchaos.forinti.com/]Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00
A new remake in Blades of Avernum Editor
Niemand
Infiltrator
Member # 5576
 written Tuesday, December 19 2006 20:11 Profile Homepage #3
In that case, I think that I may need to undertake the slightly more ambitious project of reshuffling the existing buttons and finding room for some new ones. As it is some of the arrangement has gotten a bit mixed up anyway (the zoom/realistic view button and the 2D-3D button really ought to be togetherand so on), and I think I may have thought of a way to fit in space for six more buttons now that I look at it. That would give us a bit of room to grow into.
*i's eyedropper tool should be quite easy to implement, and that would then leave ~4 free button spaces. Any other ideas for things we could really use?

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Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00
A new remake in Blades of Avernum Editor
Niemand
Infiltrator
Member # 5576
 written Tuesday, December 19 2006 19:44 Profile Homepage #0
I've been tinkering a bit with the code to the 3D Editor, and I was wondering, does anyone else ever really make much use of the fill rectangle and fill hollow rectangle functions? I realized that I don't, so in my own copy of the editor I've overwritten them with rectangle copy and paste functions, which I know are something that a lot of people have wanted.

[ Wednesday, January 10, 2007 07:00: Message edited by: Niemand ]

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Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00
Spiderweb Games Engine Preferences Poll in General
Niemand
Infiltrator
Member # 5576
 written Friday, December 15 2006 11:26 Profile Homepage #8
One of the things I missed the most in A4 was walking through the overworld map. I felt like I could see where I was going and I knew where I was. In A4 I always felt stifled and wanting to get 'out of town' to be able to see where I was. I also preferred the A1-BoA AP system over that of A4; while it wasn't necessarily very realistic I felt that it gave more enjoyable game-play.

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Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00
Physics Background in General
Niemand
Infiltrator
Member # 5576
 written Friday, December 15 2006 08:17 Profile Homepage #10
I put down "Took college level physics class or classes", although what I'm doing is working toward a degree. Even after taking three semesters of quantum mechanics though, while I can find the stationary states of a number of cute unrealistic system, I have yet to be given any sort of explanation of why we spend our time solving the Schödinger equation. Of well, maybe in grad school. . .
On somewhat of a side note, I recently stumbled across a page written by one of my professors on many worlds theory which is quite fascinating.

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Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00
The Future of Blades of Avernum in Blades of Avernum Editor
Niemand
Infiltrator
Member # 5576
 written Sunday, December 10 2006 19:56 Profile Homepage #38
quote:
Originally written by Duskwolf:
What would probably help a lot* would be Jeff making specifications available for the BoE/BoA data files. That way, third parties could create their own tools for scenario editing.
This isn't such a big problem (at least in the case of BoA; I know nothing about BoE), although it might help. If one wants to one can use the existing editor code to find out how the scenario file should be assembled. On the other hand, it might be good to have an actual specificatio, rather than a piece of existing code that must be reverse engineered. All of the other files, aside from the mac .cmg file are plain ASCII.

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Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00
ItSoD in Blades of Avernum
Niemand
Infiltrator
Member # 5576
 written Wednesday, December 6 2006 05:38 Profile Homepage #26
To actually show effects like sparkles, you need to use run_animation, so I would make this:
if (get_memory_cell(4) != 0)
put_sparkles_on_char(ME,get_memory_cell(4) - 1,3);
into this:
if (get_memory_cell(4) != 0){
put_sparkles_on_char(ME,get_memory_cell(4) - 1,3);
run_animation();
}
This can slow the game down a lot though, as it takes a fraction of a second for the sparkle animation to run, during which time nothing else can happen.

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Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00
Item Question in Blades of Avernum
Niemand
Infiltrator
Member # 5576
 written Sunday, December 3 2006 19:31 Profile Homepage #7
I believe you're looking for item 447 in Exodus, the Crystal Wand, and if I remember rightly its damage makes even the Adlerauge pale by compairison.

The moral of this story is that grep -r is wonderfully arcane looking and useful too!
EDIT: The moral continues, to say that grep is slower that Dikiyoba's memory. Oh well.

[ Sunday, December 03, 2006 19:33: Message edited by: Niemand ]

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Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00
Windows Dialogue Editor ready! in Blades of Avernum Editor
Niemand
Infiltrator
Member # 5576
 written Tuesday, November 28 2006 19:35 Profile Homepage #3
quote:
Told you, Niemand.
I know. :( I just don't know what to do about it. . . perhaps I shall place stern admonishments in the readme file that the .jar file is to be double clicked.

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Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00
Windows Dialogue Editor ready! in Blades of Avernum Editor
Niemand
Infiltrator
Member # 5576
 written Tuesday, November 28 2006 14:12 Profile Homepage #0
The version of Dialogue Editor for Windows is finally ready. Also, in light of refinements I thought of while making it, there is also an updated mac version. You can find them both at my web site. many thanks to the windows users who tested the new program for me!

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Überraschung des Dosenöffners!
"On guard, you musty sofa!"
Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00

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