Avernum party conversion utility?
| Author | Topic: Avernum party conversion utility? |
|---|---|
|
Apprentice
Member # 3752
|
written Wednesday, December 3 2003 13:56
Profile
Homepage
Apologies if someoone has already asked, curse of the newbie- I have no clue about past posts. It didn't seem to show up on a search, however... Has anyone designed, or is there potential for a party conversion utility for the Avernum series games? It would seem that there is enough similarity in stats/abilities/graphics that most party info could simply be reformated from an existing savestate of one game to, say, a new-game savestate for one of the others (at least going from an earlier to a later game, maybe also from 3 back down to 2, or 3/2 to 1 with non-humans simply removed). That, or have a generic character file format importable/exportable to/from any game, perhaps via the character editor... With so many similarities between the games, it seems a shame there's no way to play through one and then simply transfer an existing party to another... Posts: 5 | Registered: Wednesday, December 3 2003 08:00 |
|
Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!
Member # 919
|
written Wednesday, December 3 2003 14:03
Profile
That's awesome, an intelligible newbie who bothered to search before posting... good man, seanstar. Anyway. As far as I know, there is no way. I suppose if you are a skilled programmer there might be some way to transfer parties, but I have no idea whatsoever of how to do it. There's not supposed to be a way, anyway. But why would you want to? It would be boring to start off the game at level 20... -------------------- And though the musicians would die, the music would live on in the imaginations of all who heard it. -The Last Pendragon TEH CONSPIRACY IZ ALL Les forum de la chance. In case of emergency, break glass. Posts: 3351 | Registered: Saturday, April 6 2002 08:00 |
|
Law Bringer
Member # 335
|
written Wednesday, December 3 2003 14:03
Profile
Homepage
You can always do that with the character editor, but parties from the end of one game would be ridiculously overpowered in the beginning of another. It wouldn't really be fun. —Alorael, who has played with editor-made parties before. The fun wears off very quickly and you just get bored. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
|
Shake Before Using
Member # 75
|
written Wednesday, December 3 2003 14:32
Profile
There are also some of us who enjoy getting as powerful as humanly possible, and starting any game with a max-stat party is horrible for the gameplay. [ Wednesday, December 03, 2003 14:33: Message edited by: Imban ] Posts: 3234 | Registered: Thursday, October 4 2001 07:00 |
|
Guardian
Member # 2080
|
written Wednesday, December 3 2003 14:32
Profile
There's no fun in starting exile... er... Avernum with a godlike party. However, I would do it on Blades of Avernum. Anyone who thought a maxed BoE character with extremely powerful items was something wait til you see a character who already does hundreds of damage with crap weapons and could crush anything with ease get hooked up with the most power shtuff I can think up & the vast assortment of powerful abilities that exile lacked. With groups like that, there are gonna be some pretty interesting scenarios(but hack and slash will get boring fast). Posts: 1918 | Registered: Sunday, October 13 2002 07:00 |
|
Apprentice
Member # 3752
|
written Wednesday, December 3 2003 17:05
Profile
Homepage
Heh. I suppose I've just had enough experience on other boards to know certain available functions and general protocols... Anyway, yeah. I suppose I could just use the character editor, but actually entering data manually feels a lot more like cheating than an automatic process, even if the end result is an otherwise validly gained set of character stats. That, and truth to tell, the furthest I've gone so far is just pushing the edge of the Avernum demo *slaps on wrist*, so I don't have much idea of how high level characters get by the end of a full game. If characters just happen to be between level 35 and 40 by the end of a standard play of any one title, then maybe a converter wouldn't be practical, but if the highest really required level is only ~30 then a converter would be useful for players more concerned with finding out the plot(s) than level-building. I would figure that because each game is designed for characters starting at level 1, the first 25-40% of each wouldn't net higher-level starting characters more than a couple levels total, so it wouldn't necessarily mean doing full play-throughs with ubermaxed characters, only accellerating through the earlier boring bits of each game. I like levelling into power as much as the next guy, but as was mentioned, hack&slash gets old, especially against weenies, and that's all there really is to do for the first 2-5 levels. Being able to import/export individual characters within a game might be entertaining too. Try to BS Exile's 6-character party with 4 characters active and 2 in reserve at any given time... I suppose this was more of a 'it looks so simple, why not?' thing than a 'I think we need this and it looks possible' thing. I would imagine the raw character data is acessible enough in the save files and pretty much identical between games. If it's not terribly encoded, I might even be able to hack it without the in-game editors, and if I can do that, I can probably write an app to automate the process. If the savestates (Mac, at least, being what I work with most) have both resource and data forks... then maybe I could only bodge an import/export/replace toolset not a full savestate converter, but it would be something. Hmmm... But that would involve me being bored and obsessed with Avernum in a still-not-wanting-to-play-it sort of way for a few hours, and the odds of that happening are... . . . okay. Maybe I shouldn't even go there. Edit: yep. The data's all there. Looks like stats/spells could be packaged up and copied pretty directly. Items would probably require a conversion table (it would appear that at least Avernum 2 items have 4-byte IDs while Avernum 1 items have 3-byte IDs, haven't looked at Avernum 3). From what I've seen, while I didn't specifically track down abilities and specials, if they're the same for all games they can probably copy directly. *runs for cover as he hears the approaching footfalls of Spiderweb's legal dept.* [ Thursday, December 04, 2003 07:40: Message edited by: seanstar ] Posts: 5 | Registered: Wednesday, December 3 2003 08:00 |
|
Infiltrator
Member # 3040
|
written Thursday, December 4 2003 10:48
Profile
quote:Originally posted by seanstar: *runs for cover as he hears the approaching footfalls of Spiderweb's legal dept.* Seeing as Spiderweb consists of (I think?) three people, you probably won't have to run that fast. -------------------- who? Posts: 508 | Registered: Thursday, May 29 2003 07:00 |
|
Apprentice
Member # 3752
|
written Thursday, December 4 2003 18:55
Profile
Homepage
So anyway, I just finished a prototype build of a command-line tool able to swap in and out characters from any Avernum 1, 2, or 3 savestate. It could probably be refined a tad more, I have yet to run tests with parties with less than 4 characters, and it would take either a good many hours of testing or Spiderweb giving me item conversion/formatting charts to get cross-game import/export, but it's worked for anything I've done thus far within its present intended scope. Anyone know if Win/Linux savestates differ in format from the Mac ones? Even the Mac ones are data-only, with no big encoding, so I'd imagine they wouldn't be making other platform savestates much different... A good test would be seeing if a Win machine can read a mac savestate (the mac saves have a tiny bit more info than the raw game data, namely 8 bytes of creator/type info squirreled away out of easy reach, so without ResEditing a Win savestate it might be hard to get a Mac Avernum to read it). Posts: 5 | Registered: Wednesday, December 3 2003 08:00 |
|
Babelicious
Member # 3149
|
written Thursday, December 4 2003 19:22
Profile
Homepage
I had a big pile of code I wrote up to mess with Avvy's and Nethergate's internal structures a while back. I probably don't have it anymore, but whatever. Posts: 999 | Registered: Friday, June 27 2003 07:00 |
|
Guardian
Member # 2080
|
written Thursday, December 4 2003 20:59
Profile
There are so many really amazing ideas I could turn into programs if I could just learn how to program(and get some decent compilers), but I can't do this. But some of you can and you waste your skills on idiotic things like this. [ Thursday, December 04, 2003 21:02: Message edited by: Hinosu ] Posts: 1918 | Registered: Sunday, October 13 2002 07:00 |
|
Apprentice
Member # 3752
|
written Friday, December 5 2003 17:30
Profile
Homepage
Heh. useless? perhaps. impractical? you got me there. Not sure I'd go as far as 'idiotic' tho. Doing a little 2-hour job every now and then is a decent way to not get too rusty. Heck, you too can discover the joys of making a computer do useless jobs just because you can. Linux: free (ask a hacker friend if you have trouble installing yourself). gcc compiler: with UNIX/Linux. Intro to C++: depending on your standing, $50 book, ~$500 local college, $0 local high school/middle school (only if applicable, of course), or with enough motivation, $0 online. Personally, I'm not so hot with GUI in practical languages, and there's not a terribly large market for command-line apps, no matter how brilliant. That, and until I'm either being paid to code or have time to put into planning out a killer app to release on my own, motivation to spend the required hourage on a software package is minimal. I will probably expand the capabilities of this app enough to make it worth even giving away, but I'm not taking it too seriously myself. Posts: 5 | Registered: Wednesday, December 3 2003 08:00 |
|
Babelicious
Member # 3149
|
written Saturday, December 6 2003 10:09
Profile
Homepage
What language are you doing it in? I'd love a little side project, and I could make a GUI for it if you wanted. Considering you mentioned GCC, that means it's either C, C++, ObjC, or Java. I know them all except the latter. Posts: 999 | Registered: Friday, June 27 2003 07:00 |
|
Apprentice
Member # 3752
|
written Saturday, December 13 2003 09:08
Profile
Homepage
As you probably worked out from the prolonged absence of posts, the project is dying, but there's a small chance I'll pick it up again over the next month when I don't have school to worry about. I started it in C++, and that's still technically the language I'm compiling in, but I've never quite gotten the hang of C++ strings, and most of what I've done recently (apart from mandatory school java projects, but file manip in java gets ugly fast) has been in C, so I started falling back pretty heavily on C syntax. I'm using Apple Project Builder for convenience, but there's only one source file and nothing that would prevent it from being compiled in GCC at the default C++ settings. Right now I don't think a GUI wuld help much over the CLI, but GUI might make it easier to do stat editing/transfering, which is probably the next bit I would be adding. Posts: 5 | Registered: Wednesday, December 3 2003 08:00 |