Profile for Niemand
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Displayed name | Niemand |
| Member number | 5576 |
| Title | Infiltrator |
| Postcount | 627 |
| Homepage | http://hallsofchaos.forinti.com |
| Registered | Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
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| Author | Recent posts |
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| Conveyor belt in Blades of Avernum Editor | |
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Infiltrator
Member # 5576
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written Monday, December 17 2007 19:10
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quote:About a year ago I worked on this for some time, and I concluded that a unique script for every town was the only practical way. One major reason is that even if you make sure that you only move each character once, how you you correctly handle things that are next to each other on the conveyor, or when one goes off the end, stops, and the others can't move forward? -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
| Conveyor belt in Blades of Avernum Editor | |
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Infiltrator
Member # 5576
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written Monday, December 17 2007 14:58
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80 placed creatures + 34 summoned + 6 party members = 120 charcters in the town. -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
| Conveyor belt in Blades of Avernum Editor | |
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Infiltrator
Member # 5576
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written Monday, December 17 2007 13:40
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The maximum is 120 creatures, I think, and something like 144 items, but move_item_on_spot is probably your best bet for items. -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
| Trying to Compile from Source in Blades of Exile | |
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Infiltrator
Member # 5576
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written Sunday, December 16 2007 13:09
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Which copy of the source code were you using? EDIT: Carbon is not being phased out, but Quickdraw most certainly is. In XCode you should be able to turn those warnings off by going to the project build settings and unchecking the 'Warn About Deprecated Functions' item. [ Sunday, December 16, 2007 13:18: Message edited by: Niemand ] -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
| River and Leaf Port in Blades of Avernum | |
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Infiltrator
Member # 5576
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written Friday, December 14 2007 12:44
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Although Windows and Macintosh text-editor usually use different newline characters, the game is prepared for this, and converts them all to a single type as it reads them. Sadly, GA does not run under classic OS. I am kicking around some ideas for creating a zip file on WIndows that would decompress as a usable cmg file, the trouble is that the I would have to figure out both how to write the data for a resource map manually, without the help of the library functions that normally do it, and I would then have to compress that data into a zip file so that it looks like it was in a resource fork. I'll have to do a lot of research on the respective formats to get this to work, and it's probably easier to write the core of it from the mac side and just get a Windows developer to wrap it nicely, since a Windows user can't get a resource fork to find out how it's assembled or handled. -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
| About the compiled versions of BOE on the Spiderweb Website. in Blades of Exile | |
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Infiltrator
Member # 5576
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written Monday, December 10 2007 12:47
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For BoA item numbers: you can get these in a couple of ways: -look in Blades of Avernum Files/corescendata2.txt on your computer (this will also allow you to search by item name) and in Blades of Avernum Scenarios/(name of scenario you're playing)/(name of scenario you're playing)data.txt -run any version of the BoA editor and look in the I1-I5 menus Actually, I can't think of a simple list posted anywhere, although there may be one. However, if you have BoA you have corescendata, so you can always look there and in the scenario data file. Just be careful not to change these when you're looking through them. -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
| Teleport Spell in Blades of Avernum Editor | |
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Infiltrator
Member # 5576
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written Monday, December 10 2007 05:08
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There is no built in way to detect the party's outdoor location. I hit this problem a while back, and I developed a solution, but it's incredibly painful. It involved creating a grid of special floors and terrains that allows you to track all of the party's motion outdoors. It furthermore requires correct initialization of the location, since the system can only actually track changes. If you're still interested, I can write it up and put it on the Blades Forge (since it just went public) later today. -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
| Episode 4: Spiderweb Reloaded. Something like that anyway. in General | |
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Infiltrator
Member # 5576
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written Sunday, December 9 2007 19:26
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Thanks Dikiyoba! Reading a new chapter was a great break from my beastly take-home exam. And, you seem to have a truly evil plot twist in the making. -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
| Instant death nodes in Blades of Avernum | |
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Infiltrator
Member # 5576
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written Sunday, December 9 2007 16:15
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Just put a message_dialog call with your message right before the death code. The message will be displayed, then the party will die. -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
| Instant death nodes in Blades of Avernum | |
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Infiltrator
Member # 5576
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written Sunday, December 9 2007 12:50
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Not meaning to sidetrack the topic, but what platforms are you refering to, Excalibur? Classic Mac OS? -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
| Instant death nodes in Blades of Avernum | |
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Infiltrator
Member # 5576
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written Sunday, December 9 2007 12:23
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You'll also want to use Alint to check your scripts if you do much scripting. It's far more convenient to know where there are errors before you load the script in the game and it crashes. It'll help you catch things like the undefined variable sooner and more painlessly. -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
| Instant death nodes in Blades of Avernum | |
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Infiltrator
Member # 5576
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written Sunday, December 9 2007 11:31
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Yes, you will want 6 rather than 4 in that loop if there are any NPCs attached to the party whom you want to kill. kill_char(1000,...) should do all that neatly for you though. I will comment that as a player, I hate use of this tactic to prevent the party from doing things the designer doesn't want; anything else is preferable to me. I'd personally prefer this to be used only as a last resort. -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
| Function call error (binary) in Blades of Avernum Editor | |
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Infiltrator
Member # 5576
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written Saturday, December 8 2007 20:51
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This message is rare, and I have never seen any explanation for why it will be displayed. I've managed, however, to track down one possible cause: calling char_attitude_to_char with both arguments being the same character, or one being a nonexistant character. I don't know what, if any other triggers may be out there, but considering how much trouble this one gave me, I thought I'd write it down where other people could find it. [ Saturday, December 08, 2007 21:13: Message edited by: Niemand ] -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
| For all you physics gurus in General | |
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Infiltrator
Member # 5576
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written Wednesday, December 5 2007 10:29
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I've been taking a QFT course this semester, which has been awesome, but we haven't come anywhere near discussing gravity and why it doesn't work well with QM. It's a little disappointing, because I'd really like to know about that stuff, but there's just so much background necessary. I'm also becoming quite confused about some of the stuff with string theorists and so forth suggesting that the universe is 9, 10, or 11 dimensional. From the QFT I've seen so far it matters a lot how many dimensions you have, and the simplest theories break completely and become unusable if you move them to the wrong number of dimensions (since we're doing scalar fields this semester we've done almost everything in 6 dimensions in my class because the really simple theory we've been working with only works properly in 6 dimensions). From what my professor tells us, though, theories of spin 1/2 fermions and the like work best in 4 dimensions, so I'm not sure how these suggestions of much higher number of dimensions are supposed to keep them working properly. As an aside: My spellchecker thinks that 'fermions' should be 'freemasons'. -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
| Episode 4: Spiderweb Reloaded. Something like that anyway. in General | |
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Infiltrator
Member # 5576
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written Sunday, December 2 2007 13:18
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Don't be silly. You know of what I speak. However, it is usually considered out of bounds. -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
| Episode 4: Spiderweb Reloaded. Something like that anyway. in General | |
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Infiltrator
Member # 5576
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written Sunday, December 2 2007 12:38
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Darn right we need more scripting! Of course, instant death encounters are dangerous but hardly diabolical. There are other, much more carefully guarded secrets. . . far more powerful and far more insidious. -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
| NPC Searching for nearest guard in Blades of Avernum Editor | |
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Infiltrator
Member # 5576
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written Sunday, December 2 2007 11:27
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quote:1) There is no way to find out which way an NPC is facing. You can set the value, but not retrieve it. 2) Why do you need this? Do you want NPCs to only notice crimes if facing the party? If so I'm afraid that there's no good way. Other than that, I can't think of any reason you would need this. -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
| NPC Searching for nearest guard in Blades of Avernum Editor | |
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Infiltrator
Member # 5576
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written Saturday, December 1 2007 20:50
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Messages are nothing to fear, just stick to using them simply. My rule is to check for messages first and act on them before doing anything else, and it's worked pretty well. One of the best things that you can do with messages is to literally make a message propagate among npcs. I did something like that in AVM, where any brigand who hates the party alerts any other brigands he meets to hate the party also. This way you never need to 'set the town hostile', you just let the news propagate through the town and guards and towns people can do whatever they do if they know that the party is a bunch of criminals. This can be used for the problem by having a townsperson who has seen a crime committed continuously broadcast a message while doing whatever is necessary to seek out a guard. Then when it gets in range of the guard, if the guard listens for that message type, it will be alerted as soon as it sees the townsperson come running. Of course, as Lazarus points out you don't need townspeople alerting guards who already know what's going on, so you could have them seek guards who don;t know, and if none remain just run away from the party or something. -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
| NPC Searching for nearest guard in Blades of Avernum Editor | |
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written Saturday, December 1 2007 18:39
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Assuming that you have variables i, dist, and num, I think that this should work: The way that it works is that it goes through all the NPCs in the town, which is creatures 6-120, and for each one checks if it is alive, visible, is creature type 4 (Guard), and is closer than the closest known guard. All of these are true, the guard's number is stored to num and the distance to it is stored in dist. So, when the loop finishes, num will be the number of the nearest guard, or -1 if there were no living, visible guards, and dist will be the distance to the guard or 1000 if no guard was found. Of, course, this snippet just tells you who the nearest guard is. If it gives you a guard, have the creature run to it, if not you'll need to do something else. I would reccommend that you put several waypoints in your town, form which guards are likely to be visible. So if an npc sees a crime but no guards, it can pick a nearby waypoint and run there to look for guards. EDIT: Added a line break in the code. [ Saturday, December 01, 2007 18:41: Message edited by: Niemand ] -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
| Macintosh Blades of Avernum v1.2.1 beta update available. in Blades of Avernum | |
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Member # 5576
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written Saturday, December 1 2007 08:34
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And that would be exactly the piece of the puzzle I hadn't known about. Thanks! EDIT: Just noticed one issue with the new version of BoA: It runs perfectly in millions of colors, but then as it's exiting, it quickly flips the screen to thousands and then back to millions. It's not a problem really, but looks a little odd. [ Saturday, December 01, 2007 08:37: Message edited by: Niemand ] -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
| Macintosh Blades of Avernum v1.2.1 beta update available. in Blades of Avernum | |
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written Friday, November 30 2007 20:09
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Thanks! It'll be really convenient to be able to reload quickly again. As to loading picts, when writing Graphic Adjuster, I mostly just followed the pattern of the Editor's load_pict function, which uses GetPicture to do the loading. When I recently created a universal binary of GA and Tyranicus tested it on an Intel system, it failed to load any pict resources. We were able to trace the problem down to the fact that the pict's image rectagle was wrong, and although I haven'y had a chance to test (or get someone to test for me) it appears that doing a byte flip on each component of the rectangle will give the correct size again on Intel macs. However, I have a fear that the actual image data of the pict may need byte flipping, and then when writing picts back to disk more fliping may be needed. I'll certainly try out QDGetPictureBounds, since it sounds like it knows how to handle the size correctly depending on architecture, but I was also wondering if there were any more changes that would be needed. Thanks for the help. -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
| Macintosh Blades of Avernum v1.2.1 beta update available. in Blades of Avernum | |
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written Friday, November 30 2007 18:45
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I'm happy to report that this version appears to run perfectly under 10.4.10 on PowerPC. While BoA is recieving touch up work, I would again like to petition for having the load game file selection dialog window remember the last used directory. This would be a great help, since, I really would prefer not to keep all of my save files in my Documents folder, and while designing I find that I often reload dozens of times in a few minutes. I don't know if it was a deliberate descision to make the open dialog always begin at the Documents folder, or if this was the best working solution that could be found (as I recall that it came about after the trouble with the dialog defaulting to inside the application bundle), but if it was the latter, I would appreciate it if the problem could be revisited. If that was the case, I'm not sure why the default behaviors of the NavServices functions (which I assume are being used), but if nothing else works ((CFStringRef)CFPreferencesCopyAppValue( CFStringCreateWithCString( NULL, "AppleNavServices:GetFile:0:Path", kCFStringEncodingMacRoman ), kCFPreferencesCurrentApplication ))can be used to obtain the last visited directory by brute force.I would also like to ask if you would comment on the trick to ensuring that graphic resources load properly, as this is a known issue with Graphic Adjuster, and would benefit the 3D Editor as well. I've already discovered that the image dimensions need to be byte flipped after being read in on Intel systems, but without system for testing, i haven't gotten any farther. -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
| Automatic game creation potential? in Blades of Avernum | |
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written Thursday, November 29 2007 20:55
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quote:Ahem. I think we all need to be reading each others' posts a little more carefully today. Actually, looking closely myself, maybe just Aran needs to. :P -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
| Automatic game creation potential? in Blades of Avernum | |
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written Thursday, November 29 2007 12:06
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quote:FYT (Which is not something I do, as a general rule, but BoR does actually capture a large fraction of the major features of Rogue, excluding traps, food, darkness, carrying the amulet back to the surface, and duplicating the monster list, among a few others. Some were too difficult, and some, like food, were just to freakishly annoying.) With regard to BoR's windows problems, I don't have any idea why these things are happening, as I haven't been able to identify any way that my scripts or other resources could be causing them, but I haven't really had time to attack the problem. I think that Jewelz' idea was intended to be implemented with an external program, which would write out a .bas file that the author would then fill in detail for. I still think it would be ridiculously difficult for little payoff, but it's entirely doable. -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |
| Picky details in Blades of Avernum Editor | |
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written Wednesday, November 28 2007 13:00
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Does Alint not count strings toward the 750 limit? Even if not, that change I think I could add directly to it without it having to be a seperate stage. (Although that is what I said about my last idea, and it didn't work. :rolleyes: ) In any case, it's not that the prgramming for these extra checks it at all difficult, it's just threatening to yield rather inefficient solutions, which I don't like. Besides, any additions I can make to Alint can easily benefit Windows users as well. And meaning no offense to the people who put effort into the wiki, but I find that thing unusable. I would really rather keep at writing up my own documentation, slow though it is. As to the topic you point to, I have been referring to that and several other sources often to try to make my documentation as complete as possible. -------------------- Überraschung des Dosenöffners! "On guard, you musty sofa!" Posts: 627 | Registered: Monday, March 7 2005 08:00 |