BT 3 MSDOS version

Any developer realated stuff
Maven
Posts: 138
Joined: Sat Apr 16, 2011 9:39 pm

Post by Maven »

Thanks, Drifting. This is great stuff.

Things I'm not so sure about:
Lightwand - use effect?
Dayblade - use effect?
Thief Dagger - eqipped effect?
Heal Harp - use effect?
Galt's Flute - use effect?
Powerstaff - use effect?
Speedboots
Pipes of Pan - use effect?
Deathring?

Deathring casts Animate Dead, doesn't it?

Thief Dagger and Speedboots have special effect flags, but maybe they just don't really do anything?

I know the keys, eye, crystal sword, and silver shapes have special effects as well. I just don't know how you would go about putting them in the table.

I didn't know the Staff of Lor had such a nice effect. Too bad it's only usable by magic users and by the time I get it, they already have level 7 Magician spells.

Seeing those light and detection spell parameters makes me wonder how they compare to the light and revelation spells.
drifting
Posts: 152
Joined: Wed Dec 07, 2011 10:21 pm

Post by drifting »

Lightwand, Dayblade, Heal Harp, Galt's Flute, Powerstaff and Pipes of Pan are fixed. Bug in my code.

Deathring casts an animate dead spell. It's in my data file but not in the b1_items file.

The Thief Dagger, Speedboots and the others that have special effects that aren't used in a meaningful way in the code.
GeorgiaBoy
Posts: 7
Joined: Thu Mar 01, 2012 4:09 am
Location: Georgia (the state, not the country)

Post by GeorgiaBoy »

Hi drifting,

A couple of questions if you have the time:

Any information on gold drops from slain monsters?
Information on To Hit Armor Class Zero?

Many Thanks,

GB
drifting
Posts: 152
Joined: Wed Dec 07, 2011 10:21 pm

Post by drifting »

GeorgiaBoy wrote:Hi drifting,

A couple of questions if you have the time:

Any information on gold drops from slain monsters?
Information on To Hit Armor Class Zero?

Many Thanks,

GB
The amount of gold dropped depends on the dungeon level the party is on, not the monsters in the battle. Skara Brae during the day gives 1d128 gold pieces per monster killed. The rest of the levels give 1d256.

There is no THAC0 in Bard's Tale. The "Melee to-hit" range is the AC range the monster can hit. BT gets a random number that falls in the "to-hit" range and subtracts that from 10. If that number is less than the target's AC then the hit succeeds. So a kobold with a range of 0-14 can hit ACs 10 to -4.
GeorgiaBoy
Posts: 7
Joined: Thu Mar 01, 2012 4:09 am
Location: Georgia (the state, not the country)

Post by GeorgiaBoy »

Wow. Thanks for the info. Do you have any future plans for BT 3?

Thanks,

GB
drifting
Posts: 152
Joined: Wed Dec 07, 2011 10:21 pm

Post by drifting »

GeorgiaBoy wrote:Wow. Thanks for the info. Do you have any future plans for BT 3?

Thanks,

GB
Maybe. I'm thinking about doing a hard-drive only version. It should speed things up quite a bit by avoiding all of the decoding and decompressing. Apart from that, no, just fixing bugs.
dulsi
Posts: 242
Joined: Thu Mar 22, 2007 7:15 pm

Post by dulsi »

Thanks for the list of items and monsters. I've wanted to recreate BT1, 2 & 3 in btbuilder. This make it a lot easier. Of course at the rate I'm going that will be a long time from now.
drifting
Posts: 152
Joined: Wed Dec 07, 2011 10:21 pm

Post by drifting »

https://github.com/downloads/ChrisAubuc ... thiefp.exe
  • Fixed a bug in the chest trap selection routine where the game would only generate level 1 traps on chests.
  • Fixed a bug in my text cast spell routine that would return the wrong value when a string of less than 4 characters was input.
drifting
Posts: 152
Joined: Wed Dec 07, 2011 10:21 pm

Post by drifting »

dulsi wrote:Thanks for the list of items and monsters. I've wanted to recreate BT1, 2 & 3 in btbuilder. This make it a lot easier. Of course at the rate I'm going that will be a long time from now.
My original goal (besides teaching myself assembler) was to create an engine that would be able to run all three games. To accomplish this I've been converting all of the data to data structures that are a superset of all three games. So far I have the items, monsters, and spells converted and stored in XML files. I've been running out of steam on the project lately due to boredom...
GeorgiaBoy
Posts: 7
Joined: Thu Mar 01, 2012 4:09 am
Location: Georgia (the state, not the country)

Post by GeorgiaBoy »

drifting wrote:
dulsi wrote:Thanks for the list of items and monsters. I've wanted to recreate BT1, 2 & 3 in btbuilder. This make it a lot easier. Of course at the rate I'm going that will be a long time from now.
My original goal (besides teaching myself assembler) was to create an engine that would be able to run all three games. To accomplish this I've been converting all of the data to data structures that are a superset of all three games. So far I have the items, monsters, and spells converted and stored in XML files. I've been running out of steam on the project lately due to boredom...
How about both of you get together on a project? Good idea?
hedgehog
Posts: 1
Joined: Sat Dec 22, 2012 1:48 pm

Question to drifting

Post by hedgehog »

Hello drifting
First of all, great accomplishment to finally deassemble and fix Thief of Fate.
I have now caught fire and would like to look into things myself, as i have found that there are still some open bugs.
One is e.g. that the DIVA spell should also heal the party, which is not the case at the moment.
It would be really great if you could post a short how to...
disassemble, edit and assemble the thief.exe, and especially which software you use for all those tasks.
I have now spent several hours searching the net and could not find anything real helpful to me.
cheers
User avatar
Darendor
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Joined: Wed Jan 14, 2009 1:53 am
Location: Red Deer, Alberta, Canada

Post by Darendor »

Good lord, I hope you didn't burn yourself too severely.

Code: Select all

Darendor casts HOWA at hedgehog, dousing his flames!
drifting
Posts: 152
Joined: Wed Dec 07, 2011 10:21 pm

Post by drifting »

https://github.com/ChrisAubuchon/BT3-DO ... thiefp.exe
New location with a few more bugs fixed:
  • DIVA spell heals the party
  • Weapon special effects work properly
  • Kiel's Overture no longer lowers AC
drifting
Posts: 152
Joined: Wed Dec 07, 2011 10:21 pm

Post by drifting »

The weapons that cause a special effect (poison, critical strike, etc) are the
ones that show up as 0d0 instead of having the proper melee. I don't have an updated version since I can't seem to find the script I used to create it.

I don't have it handy but I can get the list of monsters by level. I'm currently working on getting BT1 coded in the engine I've created. That's my current focus.
drifting
Posts: 152
Joined: Wed Dec 07, 2011 10:21 pm

Post by drifting »

I've looked at dulsi's btbuilder quite a bit. What I'm looking to do is create an engine that can faithfully recreate all of the BT versions. C64, Apple, Amiga, DOS, etc. And in my opinion, to do that in btbuilder would require too much code destruction to implement all of the various idiosyncrasies.

As for the artwork, I have code to extract and convert all of the images, animations, wall tiles, etc from the stock BT1, 2 and 3 DOS disks. But thank you for the offer.
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