temnix

One time in my game Jaheira stepped into Khalid's circle and tripped him up.

While doing the usual "sanity check" for GLOBbing SPL files, I was thrown off by an SPL called CDDETECT.SPL. It's not a real spell, it has no abilities or global effects. Its size, therefore, is exactly 112 bytes, so it should have been bypassed by SOURCE_SIZE > 112. In fact, though, it kept bucking the installation until I added an exception for it. That nipped it, but I don't want to patch things blindly, to be surprised by any other pseudospells that might happen in some installation. There is another SPL that I routinely exclude by name, by the way, in case a mod is installed on Icewind Dale: #BONECIR. I don't remember if the problem there is the same as here or not. But I would like to know why this 112-byte stops the SOURCE_SIZE > 112 check?

Most likely, this version involved a test script which existed in my override folder but which I did not include in the distribution. +files are test devices. That part has been dropped now, and the archive updated.

Good enough. I was going to make a fix myself, but this spares me the labor. I'm including this file in the first post.

No, I don't have it yet. Thanks.

For some reason this area's TIS in Near Infinity won't be extracted as a PNG on neither my older nor my newer computer, where I have Shadows of Amn installed. If this is a problem on my side nonetheless, I'll give credit to anyone who provides the PNG.

My website storage is permanent, more or less. I just accidentally trashed the file.

The download link here was not working. It is now.

As I'm practically evaporated from these boards, it doesn't get me anything to champion any views, but it's still not true that if CGI is "normal to them," it's normal as such. It will be fake even if no one recognizes that it's fake, just as the world could live without any painters who know natural forms, and still the shapes would remain as they would have been perceived by those with the eye to see. And what the young people lack to understand the difference is simply education. Knowing nothing except Photoshop is not an argument.

I'd rather read de las Casas' "Shortest Account of the Destruction of the Indies." It's going to have a lot of detail, it's from life, and I might improve my Spanish. And the reason I went to it is because I'm playing "Colonization."

I can say this for CGI, computer effects really can bring to the screen something that couldn't be in any other way. I don't mean anything small, handheld or lifelike. A doll wolf doesn't necessarily look more convincing than a computer wolf, it may even always be a little ridiculous, but the computer wolf is not like the real thing either. Even if the CGI people copy the animal from photographs to make a still form, it shows itself false the moment it moves. But when it comes to scenes with masses of objects already artificial, identical elements or things that simply don't exist in reality (rays, projections, appearing screens and so on), there is no substitute. In the 2nd season of "Lexx," in the last episode, there are enormous battles between Mantrid drones and 790 drones, where thousands of these mechanical arms fly at each other and battle. They are all simple CGI creations and don't pretend to be anything else, but they give viewer's consent enough footholds. There is no way something like that could be done with practical effects, even though the model for the drones shown close and handled by the characters is a real arm from plastic and polyurethane foam. This is not the purpose for which CGI is used today, however. Instead of complementing reality, they replace it. Speaking of wolves, using real animals is another part of "effects" that seems forgotten today. In "Wolf," the 1992 or 1994 movie with Jack Nicholson, there is a scene with a number of them advancing on the hero and one of them even pretending to bite him. Then they run away. Obviously some animal handlers were involved. Why not use more of that instead of a fake wolf? Because a fake wolf is cheaper, because all the good animal handlers have probably retired, because there would too much red tape to clear before bringing on set animals - who are probably endangered, too... Yada yada, the typical "make it cheaper make it faster" shit. I'm not really as flabbergasted at this as I was when I started the topic, though. I wish I was. But I understand now that the viewer who would scoff at today's CGI, like myself, is also a dying breed. Today's young audience doesn't care about realism, because it grew up on computer games, and for many other reasons. After all, everything else around is fake too, from food to politicians. They are all poured of the same virtual metaplastic.

In fulfillment of the Make Amends Make Haste initiative announced across the Imperial Democracy last year, the Townhall and the Planning Authority introduce Reburied Past, Refurbished Future – an ambitious project to expand the social conscience area. As the President-Chancellor Mutate has promised, all private residences will be invited to an opportunity to host a cadaver from our tragic past as it is remodeled into a promise for the future. Tax incentives so far undisclosed will be extended to all participants in this permanent program and certain construction regulations waived to speed up its implementation. “We start gently. Potentially, though, we expect every resident in our town to host a cadaver,” said the Mayor in his regular Bathrobe Address. “Putting one in your lawn is a powerful symbol of reckoning with a difficult past in this phase of our multination’s history. SGEEP, that is, Standard Ground Engagement Examination Process, will be adjusted and some phases dropped to make this possible. The Plank of Architecture is 100% for it, the environmental impact reviews are all in, and what some people quoted as the maggot concerns will, in fact, improve soil fertility. We will all appreciate that in kindaspring when the cadavers sprout young green palms all over town. I think that’s a beautiful forward-looking symbol.” ~ The Morning Zoomerang Introduction Betting Order of play Statistics Trading with neighbors Exposition. Lottery and bidding Melee. Phases of a turn Contesting notes Against conspiracies Example game. Exposition Example game. Melee. Turn 1 Turn 2 Turn 3 Turn 4 Questions to consider

I was looking through an old games website in search of something to play, and I came across an adventure by a Sierra company, Dinamix, called "Heart of China." The screenshots I glanced at were attractive and the review did not mention any special difficulties aside from some arcade sequences, which, as it would turn out, I could even skip. So I thought, this should be nice and simple enough. Point-and-click. I had done that. And that is how the game turned out to be, an adventure with a context-sensitive cursor for picking up items, combining them in the inventory, applying them outside, talking to people in a menu - all of the invisible defaults for adventure games. I did not appreciate or notice the game's release year - 1991, all of those quests with familiar controls would be made a good five years later. This one's manual actually had to explain that the game is not controlled via a parser. So there was a lot of striking innovation there, in fact, but that is not what made an impact on me, nor the game's loose plot, which only just begins in China, certainly nor the dialogues that get weaker and cornier by the minute. Because of all that I gave up before very long, but all that is irrelevant. What blasted into me were the game screens, the backgrounds against which the action unfolded. They were drawn by hand, like in many other games before tiling and 3D came along... Baldur's Gate uses tiling in places with identical tress, by the way... but those screens were drawn, and how! The skill was unbelievable, the immersion, even ethnographic detail complete! Some of the images look so true, so correct that I had to wonder if they weren't copied from some photographs of, say, Tibet circa the beginning of the 20th century, but they couldn't have been. Not likely. To repeat, I have played adventures and Sierra adventures, I have seen nice backgrounds, original backgrounds, apt backgrounds. A lot of cartooney backgrounds, ranging from nicely unusual to predictably simplified. The sort of scenery I remember from "King's Quest" or "Quest for Glory" doesn't require that much skill, although by today's standards it may impress. And I wrote about "The Blade of Destiny" on this board not long ago, though that is neither a Sierra game nor an adventure. Still, it's adequate. Lots of games were adequate. Some kind of dude with a sword, looking more or less convincing against a tower. But there is still a long gap between that level and what I saw in this game, which just took me aback. My eyes were blinded with the light from the painted skies, the shades of scattered miscellanea, animated bystanders talking and nodding their heads were absolutely transporting. I ended up saving screenshots with an external program so I could look at those pictures later, but I find it incredible that artists of this caliber could be available in dozens - yes, that's about how many are listed in the credits here - to work on nothing more than a videogame. We are not talking about a Frank Frazetta alone in the world here. Apparently people who could paint such things - they had to paint these pieces, how else? - were in plentiful supply. Apparently this was the level you could order from industry professionals, because I don't think that these people burned out and slit their wrists after submitting these screens. They probably got paid, bought a little vacation for the family, then sat down to make another thing, no worse. This boggles the mind, because I can't think of any game today, whether AAA or AAAAAAAAA, that could feature this kind of true mastery. Compared to this, modern games that get praised for their "execution" are done by cube-shaped fingerless daltonics. Sometimes the designers used living people for models, there is a lot of embedded photography of actors there, but mostly for cutscenes or close-ups. This accounts for some of the finesse, but only for some. The actors are made to blend so well with the background that usually there is no telling who has been captured and who - drawn. There are some less convincing exceptions in a few places, but the impression is still tremendous. On the first picture the scarf is animated and waving in the wind, by the way - not an easy detail to draw. Oh wait, the last one doesn't fit.

@InThePineways Well said, only the disconnection is not just from the source stories but from the culture and mindset that made them, or something like them, believable and relevant. Until only a few decades ago the majority of people, in all parts of the world, were brought up in societies that believed in the supernatural. They had common creeds, whether Christian, Muslim, Hinduist or any other. I'm actually from a country with several generations of atheists, the Soviet Union, that is, and that gives me something of a detached perspective, but it's still true that until recently ideas like the existence of magic, mysterious worlds adjacent to the one humans inhabit and so nature spirits and shapeshifters, life after death and therefore ghosts, and so on were in the realm of possibility, even if social life in the spotlight was already industrialized and bureaucratized. But now those subjects have evaporated from the thoughts of nearly everyone. Zealots aside (and they are not a healthy counterexample), who doesn't think nowadays that consciousness is in the brain and that when the brain dies, it's all over? Who doesn't think that science falls flat on its face every now and then but is, all the same, the only real kind of knowledge? Who doesn't accept the evolutionary story of the past, devoid of events other than the big meteorite that killed the dinosaurs? And human history is about this corrupt king waging war on that one, no better; guns, microbes and steel. That's a far cry from giving Britons an origin in the ancient Troy or the idea of a manifest destiny. All of those fanciful imaginings have been laughed out of court, and even the words are gone off tongues. I think the word "werewolf" is more or less undecipherable by an average brain today - the idea behind it is too strange. Is it a dog? Is it a man in a shaggy suit? Hollywood and pop culture still reuse the tropes, but look at ghost movies there are so many of: they are completely about jump scares and ugly, distorted visuals now. I don't know a single one that honestly takes up a hypothesis that there is some continuity of consciousness after the death of the body, a parallel continuum to the events the eye can see. Such a model would instantly appear too outrageous even to the makers. It's the same with everything else that used to have a dangerous edge as a representative of a vast, unknown world outside. And there is no influx of fresh notions for the cauldron of the imagination. Science fiction may get a boost when the social order changes and priorities become realigned, but I don't see poetry and fantasy coming back as essential social forces. That would require a return to a preindustrial or a turn towards a non-industrial society. Castaneda writes at one point that the interests and methods of modern shamans are different from those of their ancient predecessors because they have no social function. You will never a shaman as a village healer or a court magician, he notes. Well, what is the point, then? Without relevance, how can fantasy be interesting or vital? That was in response to you. I was talking about something else in my post, though - growing out of the books and movies that used to fascinate and inspire. Other people have had a worse time at that, I'm sure. I've never been a fan of R. Salvatore, so I've never had to contemplate seppuku upon discovering what trash the Drizzt books are. I don't think I actually did grow out of what I still respect, however. Not out of the original Dragonlance books, not of the first Moonshaes trilogy by Douglas Niles for the Forgotten Realms. Not out of the wonderful Aladdin animated series for TV, a jewel of the 90s. Not out of the better parts of Xena, Hercules, Conan with Schwarzenegger (I prefer the second movie), and I keep "Red Sonja" on my hard drive. They are still powerful, as are the comics from the 70s issues of Heavy Metal. And Magic: The Gathering for many years held the flag high. But they really don't make them that way anymore. The external world does not correspond to these essentially simple stories and visions. It surges around them violently and wants to tear one away. As I look at so many wonderful MtG cards, I feel myself lapsing into a sort of reverie that is perfectly natural and would be congenial to, say, Thoreau and other Transcendentalist writers in the United States or their Romantic counterparts in Europe. I want to stay in that frame, in that mood and in that measure of time. I don't want to change, or become smarter, or soak up worldly experience outside. I'm not interested in splaying my being in synch with the undulations of this (im)material civilization and reality that I find out of those little windows or my own window. The coronavirus may kill me, but it will never excite me. Yet, unlike the Transcendentalists and Romantics, I realize that there can be no development to the stories. Two hundred years ago it would be different. When those writers and painters walked in the wild, or semi-wild (strange enough for the inhuman character to be felt but not so rough as to kill them), the artists and other, congenial spirits still had a future ahead, a possible future, in that environment. It was still possible, debatable, for the world not to trundle on in the direction it then did. They could, at that time, still develop and enjoy divergent notions. And maybe in nature and in open sensitive spirits there would be enough response and echo to maintain a place and a time where the poet and the painter's sentiments would be relevant and verdant. There could be a separate community through time. But that's not where we are now. It is impossible to continue traditions or countercultures once started today. Take Wicca. Its origin story was always laughable, but it was true, serious and cool in its intent and statement - a different mode of relating to the natural world and intuition. That went on until, oh, the 90s. But what does it mean to be a Wiccan now? Or a goth? I keep seeing young people in black, but what does that stand for? They have their faces buried in smartphones the same as the squares. I'm not even talking about commercialization and commodification, though, I'm saying that there is no future in dreams. To a dream sent there is no dream answering. Even if a global revolution singes this world order off the planet, something even more technical and rational and proletarian will, no doubt, take over. It is not logically necessary that this should be so, but I can't avoid this conclusion, knowing what I do about human nature.

Truly, I have no idea what you are talking about. But I made all of the later mods especially take into account EET string numbers.

Just because you are so persistent: I'm through with modding. Nothing is going to happen.

I recently came back to, played and finished Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny, the first part of a role-playing trilogy set in the world of the Dark Eye system from Germany. This game came out in the United States in 1993, translated and published by Sir-Tech. "Blade of Destiny" was followed by "Star Trail" and "Shadows of Riva" a few years later, and the sequels are said to have improved many aspects of the first part. "Blade of Destiny" was also remade in 2013 for a modern engine, and a bunch of other Dark Eye games came out thereabouts, some rather well-known. I haven't played them much or at all and don't intend to, but this information provides a little background for what follows. Some screenshots will also give an idea about this first game. What follows, then, is not a review or a Let's Play or a comparison between the original and sequels but an observation on the features of the game, including those that are unsatisfactory or hands-down broken, which add up to a very different experience from what is considered good and sensible today. The underlying principles are different. This is not instantly obvious as one plays, for some time the absence of this or the presence of that can be chuckled off as a rustic quaintness - because since then videogames have rolled on the highway to progress, don't we know that? Eventually, though, I realized that this road aims for another place and that the goalposts of which modern developers are so proud don't appear here for a reason... mostly. The broken parts sometimes contribute to this difference, and the whole thing is a portrait of a great sincerity. Obviously without thinking much, without drafts or backup plans in many places, the 25 year-old T-shirt-wearing Germans from the 90s take the player through what Roger Zelazny has called an "opening" experience, whereas modern games and their reviewers measure success by how air-tight they can make a "closing" experience. And I believe that a road that "opens" is the right one for art, to which category game-making belongs and mod-making can belong. Volumes have been written about the essence of art, and all attempts and explanations can, of course, be subverted, profaned and mocked, especially if there is a buck to be made from that. But at its core art is a personal effort at expression that admits no reproduction but by its personal nature becomes personal to the audience. So far from being irrelevant to others, true art, whether great or small in its achievement, is the ultimate relevant, viscerally linking creation. This game, for its part, is a sort of diamond in the rough where the roughness, as far as I'm concerned, is more important than the shiny stuff, which is just carbon. Now, most people come for mods to games like Baldur's Gate only to look for tweaks to a gameplay that they already enjoy, nothing more novel than that, and they can be excused (what else is one to do with them?). But in a mod or in a whole new game, a creator would do well to appreciate the asymmetrical and disturbing principles that reveal themselves in play here, and probably in many other old games, though "Blade" is particularly unpolished. Without a conscious intention not to do but only to do something else this game breaks every rule worked out since that guarantees people a smooth, predictable, repeatable, reportable, youtubeable time. Instead they are thrown about and see some kind of light. Like any real work of art, "Blade" can't be enjoyed twice - not really; it has no replay value, even though many elements are random here. Beside frustrating combat and other features not to be endured again, there is simply no point in going through it a second time after one has got it, but that single time through leaves an indelible impression. It is interesting to compare this game to Baldur's Gate with its immense replayability, and as I have spent so much time modding BG (I recently deleted more than 19 Gb's worth of crash dump files alone), I am in a good position to see every point where they diverge. Therefore I can derive lessons from this difference and make recommendations: do such and such, thou modder, if you want to support expectations, but such and such if you mean to break new ground. In the following I allow myself to emphasize the essential differences that "Blade" exemplifies with boldface. Combat should be shown, just to get rid of it, but it is the worst and flattest part of the game, except that by the end my wizard advanced enough to turn orcs such as these into toadstools. Spells have Latin or pseudo-Latin names, aiming for effect, but without any translation into English or description in the interface - or even the manual. A few words about the plot and what the gameplay consist of. Orcs are mobilizing to march on Thorwal, the capital of northerners in this region of the world. Their army will be ready in a year. The hetman (ruler) advertises for adventurers to find the magic sword of the hero Hyggelik, hidden somewhere in the wild a couple of centuries before, and slay the orc chieftain in a symbolic duel, which should break the alliance of tribes. The party is told the name of a distant descendant of Hyggelik's, living in a distant town, to start the search. Upon their visit the man gives them a piece of a map that should show the location of the sword and a couple of names of others who may know something of that old story. Traveling from village to village, from town to town, by foot and by boat, on the overland map, the party collects more scraps, usually just by talking to the contacts, though they need to do a couple of quests as well. Between and about the populated points dungeons, road inns and encounters are scattered. There is a lot about this game that doesn't deserve to be discussed here. It doesn't matter what the character classes are like or how balanced, the races are rather ordinary Tolkien fantasy stock. The indoor art is often irrelevant, and the temples in this Norse land all look like something out of "The Clash of Titans." The music is lovely, but, as I said, this is not a review. Someone who decides to play the game will find plenty of information online about automapping or the interface, and lots of warnings and hints. To begin about the relevant differences somewhere, the towns and villages are not planned to the player's convenience. They are not radiated as an urban architect would line them, nor arranged in lanes or districts. They are chaotic, but not from a random number generator. All of the houses are equally small, but they are often clumped in irregular groups. The rest varies. Cities have blind alleys in places or a stretch of impassable water tiles in between, representing a river. Villages may be scattered over a broad plain, sometimes with superfluous empty grass or pavement to one side, or stretch diagonally across, or there may be outlying houses. Some are tiny, useless hamlets. Every place is different, just as it was with real settlements in our world that sprung out around a cathedral, a fjord or a mine. The visiting player must look on the map to navigate. In part this is simply because houses look almost exactly the same, even the ones that are supposed to be palaces or brothels, but the arrangement breaks the player's expectation that the geography will conform to the needs of gameplay. Instead the player must conform to the geography. Having to do that, he willy-nilly begins to take even these abstract settlements seriously, because challenge fosters belief. Compare this to the carefully prearranged streets of Baldur's Gate or Athkatla with exactly so much challenge and gold-containing barrels per area. What is more, towns and villages in "Blade" don't have all requisite stores. In this game there exist three types of shops: chandler's, weaponseller's and herbalist's. Chandlers sell miscellaneous stuff like lanterns, torches, tinderboxes and food, though hunting in the wild is the better source of this last. Herbalists buy plants that the party's druids may find in the country, which is an important source of money, and sell some too in unlimited amounts, especially one cheap edible flower, the main means of healing in this game. Weaponsellers buy trophy weapons and furnish the party with arrows and crossbow bolts, and the combat system is so dull and broken that only missile weapons hit with any frequency. A party without characters equipped with bows and crossbows will die not from orc sabers but from the player's nervous breakdown. Now, there is much that is simply bad and awkward about all this commerce and equipage, but even in a well thought-out system access to all of the shops would be very useful to the party. Trophy weapons sell for a bundle, but they are heavy to carry around and reduce characters' action points in combat almost to nothing. A bunch of rare herbs plucked in the wild is idle money when there is no herbalist in sight. Chandlers also deal in some necessary equipment. Healers' shops can be essential for dealing with disease, and blacksmiths repair weapons. Today's player will expect all of these stores to be available more or less everywhere, a short walk away at most, and players of Baldur's Gate from 1998 can also count on a convenient, reasonable economy. It is simply the intelligent thing to do, and therefore obvious, and therefore ubiquitous. Not so in "Blade." Here small and even middle-sized settlements may have no weaponseller but two or three chandlers, the party may have to look for a herbalist in a neighboring town - or the one after that. The availability of inns and taverns also varies, though only one hamlet, I believe, does not have an inn. As gameplay this is inconvenient, as a means of immersion - transporting. Selection is poor in small towns as well. All in all, economy is circumstantial. So are the options open to the party on any particular day in any place. Visits to taverns are a good illustration. Taverns are a useful source of rumors and sometimes outright needed to ask where in the town a particular contact lives, to avoid knocking on the door of every identical house, but the party gets to talk to the bartender only if he is not too busy serving other customers, which usually, but not always, requires coming in early, before the tavern fills up. It is easy to wander into taverns too crowded even to get a word in edgewise, and then the party will have to depart for an inn somewhere, rent a room and hope for better luck the next afternoon - or go knock on doors after all. This is annoying, but would be less so with a bit more variation, and finding the right house at last feels downright earned. Still, a general principle that makes itself felt here is that reward is not predictably commensurate with effort. This by itself is blasphemy to any modern game, but the fact is, nothing that is completely fair is true to life. This rule alone is maintained vigorously through the game. For instance, as the party rests on its treks through the wilderness and a druid ventures to look for herbs, some places may not have any, no matter how high his Herb Lore skill and for how many hours he searches, but others bring an abundance. Certain places are richer in particular herbs than others. Dungeon rewards, while not random, are also not to be deduced completely from the difficulty of the dungeon. It is possible to find only a few fairly expensive weapons in the last chest on the lowest floor but pick up a mass of humbler weapons worth ten times as much after the fights on the way there. The outcomes here and in the wild are not ridiculous nor are they wholly unfathomable, but the player who thinks he can or ought to be able to bargain with the game for a definite measure of surprise is in for a surprise indeed. A modern game whose developers decided to tap into olde-worlde ideas and tease the player base with little jolts of disappointment every now and then would, no doubt, be studiously careful about their severity and never ever allow a major flop. In "Blade," however, outsized rewards or no rewards are a regular occurrence. Where respectable old games like Baldur's Gate, too, send players gliding from one encounter with treasure and experience to the next, "Blade" does not think twice about plunging into the abyss. What is the player to do? Either quit or buckle up and be prepared to stay buckled up indefinitely, because "Blade" makes absolutely no promises that now, that soon, it will become predictable and rewarding. At no point can the party simply run in a wheel for crackers. The behaviorist model is wrecked here. All that the player can believe in is that with enough exploration and chances taken he will indeed score a big one every now and then. And strangely enough (or we are simply too soft!) this buckled-up existence becomes habitual, and the player actually relaxes... Somebody will have to swim through the flooded cellar, somebody or everybody will have to go down the corridor where the walls shoot crossbow bolts. And then the last chest may contain a whopping 400 ducats! The price of rewards is boldness, not investment of time. Made by young, sincere and brash people, this game is not afraid to look ridiculous. There are random events and scenes that must have looked funny to the devs, and don't to me. There is a Monty Python reference at one point, if I am not mistaken, and a text message the party may get wandering town streets about a dancing leprechaun who suddenly falls dead. What is that supposed to be about? Probably lame jokes rather than private ones. But that's not important. The developers did not take themselves too seriously, and some modern games also don't, or pretend that they don't, in careful and focus group-tested amounts of brashness, but instead of turning the whole game into a parody of itself, this attitude in "Blade" only extends to the developers themselves, not to their world. The Germans were earnest about wanting to make an interesting adventure. And had they been told to rein in their jubilation and avoid these gags and fourth wall breakers, as they probably went on to do in the sequels, the mirth that powered the rest of the experience would probably have diminished also. You can't really instruct a joyful person to be serious and expect his heart not to cool as a result. Somewhat older designers would not need to be so told, their hearts would have already felt the chill of social pressure and fears that come with it, and their games would come out more laid-back, precise, elegant, perhaps. Majestic. Grim Fandango? Well, it's not Maniac Mansion. But the choice between youthful verve and elder elegance is not a real one. Maturity is simply getting old, even at its earliest onset. Those who are young can turn serious for a spell, but those who are older can't be silly again even if they want to. If you can still be joyful and carefree, thou modder, go ahead and let loose that whatever thing you have itching! Likewise, "Blade" is not afraid to multiply entities. There is a setting with twelve gods, and a few country names, and that's about it. The developers think nothing about throwing around cults, personalities, weird statues, riddles out of nowhere. In one dungeon, a mine, the only entryway is blocked by heaps of debris that take three game days to clear (!), and on the other side there is a bunch of dwarves that attack. How did they get there? What did they eat? What did they WANT? The tavern hint about local affairs is unhelpful: "I heard that some crazy dwarves are blocking an entrance to a mine somewhere." Ho-hum! Talk about no fear of ridicule, but the fact remains that the Germans conjured up a whole plot, or an adventure anyway, with a wave of the hand. Imagine the fear such an attitude would strike into the souls of today's dungeon designers! Even in Infinity Engine games all of the delves are carefully planned, plotted, explained in "lore," tattooed in special notes, hints, map markers, and the terrain is different in every case. On one hand, that makes them unique and memorable. On the other, this great care is self-limiting and restricts the rest of the world. An invented town, fortress, event, species or god in the Dungeons&Dragons setting imposes on the rest of creation, because they must all be taken seriously and there is way too many of them. This tendency to totality and consistency has extinguished my interest in the D&D multiverse. Some years ago, as soon as I knew what baatezu and tanarri were, I stopped being curious about fiends. Garry Gygax liked everything categorized, and I don't care to play or create for a setting that has just so many outer worlds, so many inner worlds and such-and-such layers between, with a couple of definite creation stories for the whole jewelry box. It makes me feel boxed. There is nothing to discover in such a setting, and players feel that. In a standard role-playing game they start with a definite sense of where they are and don't expect to be surprised about where they visit, and most like this feeling of familiarity. Unfortunately, familiarity and adventure are polar opposites. Some features of "Blade" simply don't work or can't be relied on, but randomness gives flexibility to the story. This is an example of how failure can be woven into storytelling. All in all, in the search for Hyggelik's sword there are seven map fragments to collect. For most of them the party only needs to visit the contacts, and none are supposed to be very difficult to obtain. In practice, though, some were impossible to get, through no fault of mine. This is how it went with one. A contact explained that her map fragment had been stolen by two (human) goons sent by a dark mage and pointed me towards his castle in the mountains. Inside the castle turned out to be one enormous empty room, in which I met and was attacked by two orcs. I had killed a crowd of orcs by then and there was no doubt that these were orcs also, they were captioned as such during the fight. In short, they seemed and were two ordinary monsters, and I assumed this was just another small encounter. I killed the orcs and on their corpses found a dozen swords, for some reason. It was one of many things that made no sense in the game, and I simply clicked out of the loot without taking anything. I saved the game then, overwriting a previous file. As it turned out, that was a mistake. I found nothing else on the dungeon floor, no way to reach the mage with the map fragment. It was only on the Internet that I found out that the orcs had carried... not the map fragment, no, but a magic bag - just another word in the long list of text entries starting with "Sword" "Sword" "Sword"... "Bag" would have been on the second page of loot, in fact. This bag, when used, would have created a door in a corner of the room. From there I would have been able to descend deeper into the dungeon and eventually meet the wizard and recover the map fragment. Such terrible design, especially in the absence of a console or saved game editor, was exasperating. This map fragment was lost to me. Another was offered by no less than 60 ducats in a random encounter by a traveling merchant whom I might never have met at all; I had no money at the time and he invited me to visit him in the town of Clanegh and buy it later, but he was, in fact, not to be found in any of the houses there. The developers had simply overlooked this part of the plot. I had some hopes for a unicorn met in the wilderness, who, I knew from the Internet guide, "might" appear a week later and bring a map fragment, but "might" must have meant a random chance, because he never returned. Perhaps aware of these problems, the developers made it possible to go after the sword with fewer fragments than the full set, though it was all still a very jumbled and confused process. I do not intend to laud this bad design in any way, but even failures such as these made the experience unique. After all, I might have missed some other fragments instead. Having found these, I might have skipped the quest at the temple of the Nameless God, which had been annoying enough. As it was, the pain of the errors from bad design highlighted the relief I felt upon learning that not every fragment was required. Which fragments I found, even which I missed during this only playthrough became part of my story. This is a good place to comment that this game involves the player physically in the process. Like many others from the early 1990s, it forces the player to look frequently at the area map, but, unlike some of its predecessors, the mapping is already automated. In the case of "Blade" that is more or less necessary, because drawing a map by hand would simply be torturous, especially in cities, where, as I said, the houses look almost exactly alike, and the settlements often stretch over many squares, that is, "steps" of the party. The dungeons are more modest, and here it would not be so detrimental to make the player draw maps on a piece of paper, although added to certain annoying features in the dungeons the task of mapping them out could be the straw that broke the camel's back. But that is a problem mostly of "Blade"'s dungeons and bland, very bland tile sets. If these were interesting and easier to walk around in, but there was no ready map feature, preparing a map might not feel like a chore. No doubt, the designers in 1992 were proud of automapping and happy to say good riddance to tracing out dungeons on paper, but in retrospect making maps was one of the features of old role-playing games that rooted players in the process and transported them to the virtual world. A place mapped out feels owned. Whether in this exact form or in some other ("Blade" has no journal, the player must record the names of contacts, their addresses and other information somewhere), physical immersion gives a new and, I'll risk saying, indispensable dimension to storytelling. This is something it would be hard to persuade today's players of, but automation in any form detracts from immersion. (There is a Durrenmatt quote I found yesterday that I like: "Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that one does not have to experience it.") In games and outside of them, the question with technology is always only to which degree it is indispensable. I see no reason not to charge players' memory cells with the task of remembering things, and if they feel like they must write facts down, what is the problem with that? For a game-maker or a modder to put players through certain motions, in exploring, in casting spells, in controlling characters or fixing information, though it may be unwelcome at first, will make the experience more personal. But only if simulation is obligatory, consistent and comprehensive. It is true that "Blade" sometimes takes exceptions to logic. It is with such bold departures that the game is able to surprise the player and sent him scrambling for a solution rather than apply some reliable tactic, inert and tool-like. Nonetheless, on the whole travel between points takes the same amount of time (albeit there are some really slow boats), hunger and thirst must be relieved on a regular basis. Disease will kill the characters eventually. It is crucial that these elements of simulation are, most everywhere, strictly observed. If they were felt as in any way optional, if the exceptions felt unexceptionable, the player would immediately object and rebel against them. This has been the problem with mods for different games, including BG, that have tried to make character parties consume food, drink, sleep and camp every so often. These additions have all failed to produce immersion, only aggravation, because they have not been ingrained in other mechanics. The parties had been just fine without all the bother. In "Blade" they would not be fine. There are quite a few events that involve hunting, food is sometimes found in dungeons, and it is a welcome discovery, because packages of it weigh too much to carry around a large supply, and the party will need to eat (and drink) all the way it rests - which is the main way of recovering health until the player learns about that overly cheap herb cure. Inns and taverns also have meal options, offering themselves up for clicking, and at different prices, rather costly sometimes. All of this makes the player take amenities seriously, and they, in turn, make serious dungeoneering and trekking in the wild. It is no joke to run out of food or not be able to find water while crossing a gigantic mountain range or if a badly wounded party must needs camp and sleep for a few days. The threat of death is constant and real, and not only in situations like these. Wherever the party goes and whatever it does, danger in its many forms is always felt somewhere not too far, like a sword edge in the underbrush. Acceptance, even need for danger here is a polar opposite of modern games, most of which give players a ton of ways to stay safe, and those they maintain a stable of hazards position them as challenges for players, a price to be paid for fun. (Like in "Darkest Dungeon." There is usually a "dark" in these self-conscious contraries, either in the name or the description.) In "Blade" danger is not a price of excitement - it is the meat and drink of it. Literally! The player is thrust into the role of a six-headed hydra of ambition, a group of people who, far from enduring danger to their best, actively hunt it to overcome it. They enjoy ranging widely and taking shortcuts for no good reason. They enjoy seeing strange sights around the bend. They have no desire to return to Thorwal or any home, sweet home. They are not on a temporary leave or bungee-jumping off a bridge, this is simply what they do. They are not like Bilbo Baggins, dragged along on a quest out of a certain heart's desire to sigh about a kettle at Bag End for the next year. They don't endure goblins, harpies and ogres, they WANT them. The player may not be so eager for fights, because the combat engine is so terrible. Still, the whole thing is quite a rush. The player makes decisions all the time. This story of the search is not easily rolled back in "Blade." This RPG rewards commitment and penalizes backtracking and saving the game outside of temples - in a dungeon, for instance. Every save costs 50 experience points for every party member. It is not a steep price, especially given that every combat encounter brings at least 57 experience points, but this feature has kept me from saving before every possible trap or inconvenience. And experience represents discovery of an enemy: the first time a new monster makes an appearance the party receives many more points than afterwards. XP are not handed out on a per-monster basis. Running into 10 orcs a second time (and having to kill them all) only gives the minimum, 57 points. The combat system is so awful that upon winning I would immediately save the game for 50 just to avoid the drudgery of a repeat fight if anything went wrong later. A more intelligent reward system or better ways to finish fights quickly or avoid combat completely would have been most welcome, but the basic idea is sound and very different from D&D's, where combat experience represents achievement. Experience as discovery is more relevant to the idea of adventuring. In Baldur's Gate one could conceivably reach the level cap by killing xvarts in a row, but there is no such thing as grinding XP in "Blade," and with a few exceptions the bulk of experience is awarded for completing quests, not fighting. (Planescape: Torment is similar in this among the Infinity Engine games.) The last characteristic that I'm going to mention is special encounters. Fights are a common bother and strolls on city streets are uneventful, but in the wilderness in particular the adventure finds a real form in special challenges. The form of the challenge depends: it may be an opportunity to hunt some deer, a meeting with a beast of myth, a unique riddle (or a beast with a riddle), a dangerous climb that improves a character's statistics on a permanent basis, a chance to cheat at cards (and be permanently barred from there if caught). These experiences are not generally to be repeated, or not in the same place and in the same manner, and for this reason they comprise characters' biographies - and enter the biography of the player. And because there is generally no telling when the next challenge will come up or in what form, true exploration becomes the essence of the non-linear gameplay. Bugs and problems aside, a complete spoiler about what is where and how to overcome the challenges would take all meaning out of the game. For contrast, it doesn't matter much if the main character of Baldur's Gate soon catches on that Sarevok is the author of all his woes; in fact, it is completely clear by the time of the return to Candlekeep, and the pretense that the player does not understand who "Koveras" is does not hold water at all. BG can afford to stick with such devices, for a time anyway, because discovery is not the engine of enjoyment there. The first time through is different, of course, that is when the player gets to see the sights prepared for him, but a lot of the pleasure comes from the meaty, predictable gains in the form of loot, new powers and levels. Replays are almost completely about this. In the sequel there is so little real exploration that the gameplay is only propelled forward by the lure of powergaming: more items, higher pluses... The end result of these differences is that "Blade" feels not like a game (which BG does at once even the first time around) but like a short span lived in another reality. It is not the party on the bottom of the screen that lives it, but the player. The player is challenged, the player makes choices, enjoys and suffers the randomness of this life, misses out on some of the rewards and probably does not want to look back over his shoulder to find and scoop out all the others. It is almost like a session of improvisation theater: nobody wants to go back to cover all possibilities. The dungeons and secrets in "Blade" are perfectly fine undisturbed, some of them. The player simply lives through this experience, shrugging a lot of the time, gets the magic sword and then hopes for something new and different in the future. Who knows where, what? Arkania is a big place, and the characters have most of their lives ahead of them. Modern games are built from the start at traps for people's time and attention. Their creators would make them last forever if they could, and they put in as many repeats and loops as they feel will give players an illusion of achievement (like crafting, perks or ability trees). What is more, modern games declare themselves to be only games, merely games, they wear a smiley on their sleeve, and in this faux nonchalance they lay claim to an unmeritedly great part of players' lives, because something that starts out proclaiming itself as nothing but trivial and demonstrates and augments its triviality in every way does not deserve any real lived time at all. A game that is merely a game is not even that; no game in the real world is. Soccer, chess or hopscotch, they are all vehicles of social communication and meaning. Art is much more, but a game that is merely a game is only one thing - a commodity. It is some indifferent stuff to sell, a loaf of bread, more like an appearance of a loaf, a certain volume of procrastination offered per dollar, and it mocks time, commitment, imagination and sacrifice, all of which art involves. Most mods also perpetuate the cycle of banality by making their games' experience "better," which usually means putting more filler there. More monsters, more spears in stores, more "options." Choose forever from some nonsense. "Blade" is an old but vigorous game, it is evergreen. Yes, it is too problem-ridden to take up again, and there is no point. I think its designers made so many careless mistakes mostly because they did not strive for an eternal present of perfect gameplay. Golden halos were not their desired headgear. They did not mean their game to be playable over and over forever, because then players would be stuck inside forever, and that is a cruel thing to wish on people. The Germans wove the story through to a happy end, which is to say, the future. In that finale, as the concluding paragraphs in the manual set out, the party relaxes by a fire somewhere, over tankards, and waits for a new summons. Is that death? It does not feel like it. Death just happens, it is not deserved. Life is deserved, by being alive, and life is full of surprises. But loss is part of the gameplay in "Blade". Map fragments may go unfound, the unicorn may turn out treasonous or frivolous or too beautiful, and characters may lose valuable items in the swamp around Hermit's Lake. The guidebook I read warns players to save the game (spending 50 XP) in case a nice chain mail or an enchanted sword sinks in the bog. And I saved the game, but I had invested many hours into playing by that point, I had suffered through such a slew of horrible, endless fights that I was simply obliged to learn something out of self-respect. And what I learned was not to cling to anything. In truth, I would have liked to be able to cling to some things, to keep some achievements, but as I knew it was impossible, I do not think I would have gone back to the save no matter what I lost. Yet I did want to look ahead, towards what was coming. And "Blade" represents just that type of experience, so uncommon today: forward-facing.

Update. I fixed the cutscene so that the conversation will always begin. Also you must dispatch the assassins before going to bed at Winthrop's. If you do what Endarire did, help Firebead, then peacefully stretch on the sheets for nice eight hours of sleep, don't expect to wake up and have them handily blasted. In fact, don't expect to wake up at all.

I never did find out why the variable wasn't being noticed, but that's not important now. I did the whole thing in a completely different way.

Stat changes aren't taken stock of during dialogue, neither from ChangeStat nor from Apply. The engine doesn't see new values.

The recoloring is not simple here. It's OBVIOUSLY not grayscale either. I had to look quite a bit into how to get the right feel. And farming is not the point, although it's possible to earn some experience there. The purpose of the spell is to travel. OBVIOUSLY. Those who are getting a crash trying this on the old engine or Tutu should try these file versions. SWALK_#.SPL SW=_#.SPL

"By a road obscure and lonely..." Recently I found out how to transport the party from a place in one area to the same coordinates in another. This gave me the idea to create the Demiplane of Shadow, with a duplicate underlying every one of the existing areas. The Demiplane of Shadow is a place of worst-case scenarios and ruling entropy, where the colors are dark and muted, the sky is always overcast, villages, cities and castles appear as ruins and familiar people can be encountered, but they are bitter, silent, warped or defeated, or possibly shouting accusations at the party for abandoning them long ago. And there are shadows everywhere... I want to bring some of this to the screen. I tried different image adjustment tools, and I worked out a look and a sound. As for Shadow Walk, it is a 7th level wizard spell from the Player's Handbook for going there, and I have it working - in one area for now. Here comes the part that makes a difference. I could have put this shadow duplicate together by hand, and it started out that way, but later I worked out a method to process all existing areas and patch them to take advantage of their actors, ambient sounds and regions (@DavidW provided some encouragement). Instead of building up every area, I have the code now that will convert actors to their counterparts who are not exactly in the same places nor what they seem, replace ambients with those from my own set and substitute gloomwing haunts for floor regions such as traps and "reputation traps" in cities. The shadow areas will have no doors to open, no connections to other areas and no chests, barrels or other containers, nor special area-wide scripts or scripted encounters. All of this can be done automatically, but I need some people willing to recolor the other areas' tile sets in the same style, applying my filters. This will not be difficult, but it will be pretty boring, routine work. Some people around here offer their help testing things. They can do better and work on duplicate areas. Although I could take this single prepared area and turn it into some kind of local quest, that's not my intention. This post is a call for those modders who want to step in and help make Shadow Walk a supremely useful spell. It will become that when every area has a shadow duplicate. The idea is simple: the party casts the spell and is transported to the same point on the demiplane, then marches in a straight line across a phantasmal landscape, over water, walls, roofs, mountain slopes, through the rocks of dungeons to the point where they want to reappear and use the spell's secondary ability to exit to the light world. In modding jargon, shadow areas have empty search maps. This is their first benefit. The second is being able to bypass traps (gloomwings are a nuisance, relatively speaking). The party can also surprise enemies. Like Dimension Door, this bypass can screw up prewritten scenarios and sequences, but - buyer beware. In practice, since Shadow Walk is such a high-level spell, only areas in BG2 would need to be worked over. For this demo, though, I took an area from the first game - central Baldur's Gate, with the gardens, the wall, the fair and Oberon's manor. I only guarantee that it will work on an Enhanced Edition game for now. When you load a saved game in the first BG with this mod installed, the party will be taken to the southern part of this place and given a scroll that can be used twice. For demonstration the spell will need to be cast from the scroll. Have a wizard use it anywhere in the area to shift to the Demiplane of Shadow. The wall that cuts across this area is a good place to test the usefulness of this spell, but you can also just walk about. At first the instinct to stick to the streets will be strong. When you get the gist and decide where you wish to exit, e.g. behind the backs of Marek and Lothander, use the scroll again. When the scroll is used either time, it will send through the caster and all party members in the fireball blast. I suggest loading a game with a fairly strong party, because the shadow world is not a safe place. If you enjoy the experience enough to offer help, drop me a line or say so here. Download

Yes, there should be no cutscene there. I'll tweak that sometime soon. The problem is that for the assassins to appear every time, wherever the player may be at the deadline (and they do), a rather funky function needs to be used. On rare occasions they may show up behind an obstacle and not see the player to start the conversation at the end of which the cutscene ends. They are still there, though. I'll eliminate the cutscene mode. The Vanishing Act doesn't follow the standard format of the toolset required to be added to the starting spell selection, just like all my other spells. You don't get them at level-up either. They must be found somewhere in the world.

Not normally. If I were randomizing some one variable, I would just use RANDOM as written, and the code inserts the right references depending on what is rolled. I finish with an END this bit of patching and start RANDOM again for the next PATCH_IF. I've done this many times. Here is how I'm randomizing doors to accept one of the three key items I made half of the time. I don't see a difference here, unless it's because above I'm putting in @TRA references, and those need to be forgotten in-between somehow? GET_OFFSET_ARRAY "doors" ARE_V10_DOORS PHP_EACH "doors" AS "ind" => "door_offset" BEGIN READ_ASCII ("%door_offset%") "door_name" READ_LONG ("%door_offset%" + 40) "flags" READ_ASCII ("%door_offset%" + 120) "key" PATCH_IF ((~%flags%~ & BIT1) == BIT1) & ((~%flags%~ & BIT6) == BIT6) & (~%key%~ STRING_EQUAL_CASE ~~) & !((~%area%~ STRING_EQUAL_CASE ~AR1100~) & (~%door_name%~ STRING_EQUAL_CASE ~Door1113~)) & !((~%area%~ STRING_EQUAL_CASE ~BG1100~) & (~%door_name%~ STRING_EQUAL_CASE ~Door1113~)) THEN BEGIN SET randomtry = RANDOM (1 6) PATCH_IF randomtry = 1 THEN BEGIN WRITE_ASCII ("%door_offset%" + 120) ~KEYA_#~ END PATCH_IF randomtry = 2 THEN BEGIN WRITE_ASCII ("%door_offset%" + 120) ~KEYB_#~ END PATCH_IF randomtry = 3 THEN BEGIN WRITE_ASCII ("%door_offset%" + 120) ~KEYC_#~ END END