The initial post
In September 2019 I told the world for the first time of a certain project that I just called Damage Calculator. I did not make the application strictly public, as I only had the source code to give to others (no Windows or Mac installers, not resources to make them), and an experimental build as a web page using WebAssembly (nothing being mature at all). I asked people to message me if they wanted the URL of the web build, so they can try it, and I think I gave it to a total of 3 people. I did not get much feedback in the Reddit post either, but I got a lot of positive votes, which was good enough at the time.
Then in the next months I found that people asked "is it X better than Y?" more often that I though, and I did myself manually those damage comparisons, and posted screenshots of the plots. I saw that it was a good way to show the usefulness of the application, and that I would benefit from making it public. I kept working slowly on it, adding small features with the plan of achieving that eventually.
The ambitious plan
Time passed, and I eventually got a bit frustrated with some tools. I wasn’t able to make EEKeeper work on Linux (it’s a Windows only application, but it could work through Wine). I knew that a great feature for the Damage Calculator would be to get information from saved games, or from the item files. I completely discarded that idea when I started, but I also asked myself the deadly "but how hard could it be?". Additionally, I wanted to polish the internals of the Damage Calculator, and add new kind of charts, calculators, helpers… So a new opportunity to start a hobby project came.
I started a new project repository, and starting getting parsers for the first Infinity Engine data structures, and some unit tests. I also started creating a shell that could host the former code of the Damage Calculator, and added a few features.
I called this Moebius Toolkit, since it’s a set of different tools for Infinity Engine games (and good names using the word "infinity" are mostly taken, so I went for the name of the creator of the famous strip, which is so tied visually and functionally with the concept of infinity).
The Moebius Project Website
The Moebius Toolkit is one part of the Moebius Project, which has its own website.
- Moebius Toolkit. The home page of the app made by the Moebius Project.
- Damage dealing comparisons. Explained charts done with the Damage Calculator.
- Arcane spells guide. A guide to the arcane spells (Mages, Sorcerers and Bards).
- Divine spells guide. A guide to the divine spells (Clerics, Druids, Shamans, Paladins and Rangers)
- Compared spells. A look at different spells that serve similar, if not idential purpose, but work in a different way, or at a different level.
- Death Spell Gallery. A collection of screenshots that I took while having fun with Death Spell.
- Repeated probability. A chart displaying how the chances of something happening at least once vary if you apply the effect repeated times. This can be useful to estimate the chance of succeeding at affecting an enemy when you hit it multiple times with some weapon that carries some special effect (like poison) or you use an spell sequencer to apply the same spell two or three times in a row.
- Mechanics. An in depth explanation of some game mechanics. Covers both mechanics and rules obviously relevant to the player, casual or experienced, or more subtle calculations (like the rounding performed in some cases), for people obsessed with the details.
- Mivsan_NT’s playthrough notes. This Baldur’s Gate saga playthrough is so good, that I had to pay homage to Mivsan_NT and his work by indexing the episodes and transcribing some remarkable points of each episode. This is a great playthrough to learn a lot about the game, and this page is a collection of notes that could be useful in obtaining maximum profit from the videos.