Methuselas wrote:Hey, Guys. Just shouting out. We're okay. Parts of my area are under mandatory evac, but all the freeways are flooded, so even if we wanted to leave, we can't. Looks like we've got another week of raining, too.
I guess I should be grateful we still have power. Some of my friends and family, don't.
You are in the area of the hurricane? I didn't realize! I'm very glad you're (basically) okay. Stay safe!
Yeah, Sugarland. Just outside of Houston. Neighborhood is flooded in. I had to help a lady, with her kid get across the street. It's 3 ft deep on the street in front of my house. Thankfully, we're far enough away that we shouldn't get flooded. I should have had my family leave an hour ago, but I refused to leave, without my 90 year old neighbor and his niece and they wouldn't leave without me.
We'll be okay. Hey, at least I'm off the week. Plenty of time to make more images.
"Using No Way as Way; Having No Limitation As Limitation". - Bruce Lee.
Methuselas wrote:Hey, Guys. Just shouting out. We're okay. Parts of my area are under mandatory evac, but all the freeways are flooded, so even if we wanted to leave, we can't. Looks like we've got another week of raining, too.
I guess I should be grateful we still have power. Some of my friends and family, don't.
You are in the area of the hurricane? I didn't realize! I'm very glad you're (basically) okay. Stay safe!
Yeah, Sugarland. Just outside of Houston. Neighborhood is flooded in. I had to help a lady, with her kid get across the street. It's 3 ft deep on the street in front of my house. Thankfully, we're far enough away that we shouldn't get flooded. I should have had my family leave an hour ago, but I refused to leave, without my 90 year old neighbor and his niece and they wouldn't leave without me.
We'll be okay. Hey, at least I'm off the week. Plenty of time to make more images.
Hey! I know exactly where that is ... I have an ex-aunt and uncle (i.e. related to my ex-wife) who lived there for years. We'd visit them and all go to Ren-Fest together! Glad you're safe!
More good news: while you've been (or will be?) working on images, I've been adding more to the random dungeon generator. I'll be ready to put out an update very soon but as an overview:
You can now set it to "city", and it will create a BT-style city map (versus a dungeon map). The city setting will also randomly add tower, castle, and grand plaza like features based on its settings. You can choose which if any will be added, how many "tries" it will make to add a particular type of feature, and the "chance per try"; i.e. if you want exactly two towers, you can check "towers" set the % chance to 100, and the number of rolls to 2. Put another way, if you set percent to 20% and number of rolls to 6, it will roll the dice six times, adding a tower to some random location in the city every time the roll is 20 or less out of 100.
Incidentally a "tower" is a single building surrounded by a 1 square "clearing" and then a solid wall of buildings with a "path" punched through the "wall" in one random direction. A "castle" is the same idea, but the central structure is 3x3 versus 1x1 with an entry "hole" on a randomly determined side. A plaza is a 5x5 empty space surrounded by a wall of buildings with a path punched into each corner.
I've also added a "maze" option, which creates dungeons that are nothing but close packed twisting corridors with very few rooms - sort of like what the Maze of Dread looks like in BT2 (versus a more "standard" dungeon like Oscon's or Dargoth's). The maze option has a "horizontal" or "vertical" option that makes the maze favor a certain direction (or you can just leave it neutral).
Finally, it tentatively allows for a resize (the current version if you try to change the size of the dungeon it automatically resets to the original size based on the file you loaded in). The resize works in the random generator, and all the right information is stored in the resulting xml file, but when you try to load it into BT Builder, the editor thinks it is the original size (i.e. if you resized a 22x22 into a 33x33, it saves the entire 33x33, but BT Builder still thinks and draws it as a 22x22, which totally messes it up). You can easily just open the xml and change the xsize and ysize to be the resized value and the dungeon will open correctly in BT Builder, but obviously I want the saved xml to actually reflect the altered size on its own.
In principle that's easy - the editor parses the xml into "chunk of everything that comes before the actual dungeon layout" followed by "each square of the layout" followed by "chunk that has the last square and all of the special data." I just have to insert a finer parsing of the xml to fix the problem...
Next on my list (after I put the new version out) is to add caverns (I'm thinking I'm going to have it use Perlin noise to "eat" caves out of a completely solid dungeon) and D&D style dungeons (non "space filling" relatively simple room/corridor combos).
An update to the random dungeon generator is now available.
To get it click on the link in my sig (BT Builder Modules).
Download the "BT Random Dungeon" zip file.
Extract it wherever you want it.
Run the application (NOT the setup, which just seems to generate an error)
Tell it you trust it.
It'll install, and you should be able to run it from your start menu, or just from the application in the folder you extracted everything to.
Additions:
* You can now manually set "x" and "y" (the x-size and y-size) of the dungeon to be whatever you want. Previously, if you changed these values and then hit Generate Dungeon it would automatically revert the x and y values to match whatever dungeon file you had currently loaded into the program. In effect, this meant you had to use BT Builder's map editor to actually set the size of the dungeon. Now, once you have loaded in a dungeon file, you can have it generate new dungeons of whatever size you like.
- Although not an addition, it's worth mentioning that if you really want to make it create excessively large dungeons, you should decrease the scale setting so that the dungeon map it displays is not much, much larger than your screen...
* New Build Methods:
- City: Causes the generator to make a "city style" map. Cities consist of 1x1 buildings (with a door in each wall) arranged around main and side streets, similar to Skara Brae in BT1 and the cities in BT2. The generator will also (optionally) add towers, plazas, and castles to your city. Checking or unchecking the feature will determine whether or not the generator will add these features. If checked, you can set the maximum number of the feature that will appear, and the chance that the feature will appear: the program makes a number of rolls equal to "chance" and adds a feature every time the result of a d100 is less than what is listed under "%". Towers resemble the city appearance of Kylerean's Tower and Mangar's Tower in BT1. Castles resemble Harkyn's Castle (again, what appears in the Skara Brae map), but with a somewhat smaller "courtyard" around them. Plazas resemble the "Gran Plaza" in Skara Brae. Whenever the program adds a feature to the city, it will always add it far enough away from the feature it most recently added to keep it from overlapping - but it is possible the new feature will overlap (and partially or totally overwrite) anything placed before its immediate predecessor. Once all of the features have been added, it does a final check looking for any buildings that are completely surrounded by other buildings and attempts to add an "alley" giving the building access to a nearby street. Of course, it's worth mentioning that the random nature of the algorithm isn't perfect, so it is possible a particular random city might have a section that is completely closed off from the rest of the city. Generally this only happens when "features" take up space where there was once a street (the algorithm lays streets in a way as to keep from ever closing off sections of the city, so only a feature can "overwrite" street access and "close off" part of the city).
- Maze: Creates a dungeon maze (like BT2's Maze of Dread dungeon) - lots and lots of twisting, random corridors with almost no rooms (at least if you don't make the maze settings really extreme). "Maziness" is literally how complex the maze is - the higher you set this, the more walls there will be (and the more likely the walls will create closed rooms that the algorithm will deal with by adding doors). So (ironically) the higher you set Maziness, the more doors you're likely to get. Under "Maze Style" you can leave it at its default ("neither") or opt to skew the maze toward either mostly horizontal or vertical walls. Selecting horizontal or vertical will give the maze a definite "elongated" feel in that direction (it actually cuts the frequency of the "wrong" direction of wall to one-quarter the normal value). For example, a high maziness with "vertical" set will create less of a classic maze, and more a maze made of "columns" of thin vertical rooms.
More additions in the (somewhat) near future.
EDIT: Not game breaking, but I did find a bug: if you resize the dungeon to be *smaller* than before (or smaller than what you loaded in) it will crash the random dungeon generator. The workaround is obvious - if you are going to change the size of the dungeon you want randomly generated, you can make either (or both dimensions) larger but not smaller. If you want a smaller random dungeon, re-size it to smaller in BT Builder's editor before loading it into and running the random dungeon generator. The fix is already in the version I will release next, but I don't intend to release it until both the "cavern" and the "classic dungeon" options are ready to go. (Cavern is pretty much done and I'm happy with how well it is working. Haven't started programming in the classic option yet...)
Last edited by caars on Mon Oct 16, 2017 1:30 am, edited 1 time in total.
Got some new images ready (not many, about 20, including mummies and a few more undead), but I'm lost in Battlestar Galactica:Deadlock. I'll post them, when I'm not saving the 12 Colonies from annhiliation.
"Using No Way as Way; Having No Limitation As Limitation". - Bruce Lee.
By all means! If the colonies go down, we might never get a chance to exist (or, at the very least, our Mitochondrial last common ancestor might be something a lot more boring ... like from ... ugh ... Earth).
Two bits of news. I've almost got my current module to the point where I'm willing to "publish" it (i.e. just make it available for you guys to look at/play). There's a lot of work that still needs doing, but it contains a city, 13 fully stocked dungeon levels, and just about all of the "plot" elements for the city and the first three dungeon levels are in place (along with the last dungeon level) - the remaining levels are fully "stocked" but I'm going to put a lot more story, side-quest, and plot encounters into them as I continue to develop this module. Lots of items and monsters too, although the spell list is very incomplete for now (let me put it this way, though: if you legitimately play the module and don't just edit your characters to be high level, by the time you get high enough level to "run out" of the spells I've put in, I will have added all the additional spells).
In playtesting (I'm polishing up the city at the moment - haven't even gotten to the first real dungeon level) I have run across an ODD bug...
Here goes: if you press an arrow key while the game displays your rewards for beating a combat encounter, the game actually immediately goes back to the "you are facing monsters, do you want to fight or run" screen - with no monsters present. In other words it looks kind of like:
You are facing
Do you wish to
Fight
Run
If you select fight, you have to select actions for the round. If you select run, you'll attempt to run normally - it seems as though sometimes you get away, sometimes you fail to escape (but the fight just "ends" and returns to the reward screen) and sometimes the application just crashes. Same if you select combat actions - the moment you confirm your last action, the fight instantly concludes and you return to the reward screen (with apparently the rewards identical to what they were before). I did double check, and the screen is just finishing out reporting the rewards from the actual fight - it doesn't actually grant the XP and gold a second time.
Incidentally, if you press an arrow key again (I was pressing up arrow, so if you want to replicate the error and other keys aren't working, try that one) in response to the "fight but not a fight" screen, the application instantly crashes - sometimes. Obviously, the return to the fight screen does something unstable, but I haven't been able to consistently determine under what circumstances the application "survives" the weirdness of the "return to fight screen bug" and keeps running and when it just up and crashes.
I'm right to a scripted fight, so I'm going to test the bug a bit more (I'll edit this if I fight anything new), but definitely worth reporting.
EDIT - Did find a few things and updated my description of the bug to better reflect what I was observing while trying to test...
I've playtested all the way through the main "city" (i.e. introductory) quests in the current module I've been focusing on, so I've "released" it in (very) beta form. Here are the details:
How to find and use it?
Click on the link in my signature. Download bardcore.zip.
TL;DR version: Unzip it, and put the module data where you'd normally put module data for dulsi's bt builder program.
More detailed (because I hate it when people just assume I know what to do, although this is way more detail than any regular to this thread or forum probably needs):
Once you've got bardcore.zip downloaded, right click it and hit copy.
Go to your bt builder directory. By this, I mean go to wherever you have the executable you run to start up bt-builder installed.
You should see a modules folder. Go there (click on it).
Now you should see a folder called content. Go there (click on it).
Right click and hit "paste" to put a copy of bardcore.zip inside the content folder.
Unzip bardcore.zip. The whole thing is just a zipped folder (called bardcore) that contains all of the content files for the module.
Once the bardcore folder (and all of its files) have been created/unpacked inside the content folder of your copy of bt-builder, you just need to tell bt-builder that the module exists and where to look for its data. To do this, click on the bardcore folder. Find the file "bardcore.xml." Copy it (right click it and select copy). Go up two folders (from bardcore back up to content, and from content back up to modules) and paste bardcore.xml here: right click and select paste.
Now when you run bt-builder, you should see one of the modules you can choose from is "Bardcore" (it will literally have quotes around it). Run it and you can create characters and start playing it. It should also come with a starter party "inspired" by the original Bard's Tale 1 starter party, if you want to immediately get into the action.
What's in this module?
A complete city to explore, along with 13 full bard's tale 1-sized dungeon levels. The "main quest" is only written to dungeon level 3, but the actual features of each dungeon level (non "plot" encounters, monster hordes, flavor messages, a decent amount of non plot backstory, treasure tables, traps, dungeon features, stairs, portals - all of it) are there. As long as you're not overly interested in advancing a story, you've got 13 full dungeon levels to map out, explore, fight monsters, and get treasure in.
Where's the item and spell list?
Use the spell list from bard's tale 2. Yes, eventually I will publish a complete list of all of the spells and what they do, but if it is a spell from bard's tale 2, it's in the game (and uses the same code and general stats as it did in bard's tale 2).
Okay, okay - actually so far only the conjurer and magician spells through spell level 4, and the sorcerer and wizard spells through spell level 1 are in the game. But the spell list is the next thing I'm working on (other than general play testing), so unless you cheat, by the time you have characters that can cast higher level spells, they'll be in the game.
The item list is also the list from bard's tale 1 and 2. Same items, that do the same things. Heck, even the ones that have been added from bard's tale 3 do what they did in bard's tale 3 (i.e. Harmonic Gems restore all of your spell energy). If they don't, that's a bug, and let me know about it.
Wait, does that mean equipping armor makes it easier for me to hit?
Yes. I'm not really interested in your main fighter-types whiffing a lot like they do in "real" btcs games, so armor improves both AC and hit bonuses. By the time your fighters are totally decked out, they should be able to hit almost everything in the low level game.
Beware, because that means that monks in particular are a lot weaker than you may be used to them being. At higher levels monks will do a lot more damage than "straight" warriors, hunters, and paladins, but because their "class" AC bonus doesn't give them a to-hit bonus, they could very well miss a lot more. I'm actually inclined to leave that in the game as a way to "balance" monks - when they *do* hit, they HURT, but they don't hit as consistently as other fighter types (and warriors, paladins, bards, and hunters WILL basically out-fight them quite a bit at low levels).
Are monsters supposed to be giving super low XP?
Yes. Bardcore is a slow advancement module. It's actually intended to use a lot of the "rules" from BTCS - so I haven't mucked around with monster xp awards for low level monsters, or "balanced" the somewhat overpowered bard songs, or anything like that. For this module I was really interested in creating something that uses the "game structure" of BTCS (as though I couldn't mess with the basic advancement stats of the races and classes) and tries to actually make it reasonably fun to play. Incidentally, giving armor to-hit bonuses *is* something BTCS would allow, which is why I put it in.
BTCS rules? Does that mean spells are very limited and can only do one thing?
No. As much as possible I made spells try to do exactly what they do in BT1-3, not BTCS. Yeah, it's not consistent with a "hardcore, BTCS-rules-only approach," but there's only so much in terms of the limits of BTCS I'm willing to leave in. After all, BTCS *wasn't* good, and the whole point of bt-builder is not NOT have BTCS's limits.
Also, around level 8 and up, monster XP values will start to increase quite dramatically over what BTCS would calculate them as. This is to avoid the "arms race" scenario BTCS's instruction manual mentions - to make monsters worth reasonable amount of XP (which they really haven't been in the module up to this point), I would need to make their stats so absurd that the party's items would need to be "through the roof" powerful to compensate (i.e. swords that do 1000+ damage to deal with monsters that have 1000+ hit points, so they can actually be worth 1000+ XP). I figure if you've stuck it through to this point, the reward is the module begins to "transform" to feel much, much more like a classic bard's tale game.
When will you update stuff?
Pretty much as it gets designed and play tested. The zip file will likely be updated every week or two for a while. Just check the date on the zip file - if it is more recent than the one you have sitting in your bt-builder's module directly, download and unpack it. It probably has encounters, spells, and items that have been added - and corrections to bugs that I've rooted out.
My intent is that once a "dungeon level" is "story complete" (as opposed to just "stocked with stuff") that I will leave it alone - so that you don't need to go back and explore it again if you are playing along. If I do add something new to a "story complete" level, I'll post where the new content is, so you can go straight there and see/encounter it.
Right now the city, and the first two dungeon levels are "story complete." I'll edit the end of this post as additional levels become story complete.
Any other gameplay tips?
Before you get Garth's Shoppe up and running, you might find the "vopl" spell very useful. Nearly all encounters in the SW section of the city are extremely easy since you are not yet equipped with weapons and armor. Even just punching you should be able to finish the fight in a few rounds. And if a "vopl" enhanced character scores a hit, the added damage will likely finish your foe off immediately.
Save your game a LOT. You should be able to handle most encounters (I've been very careful to try to make them very well balanced around a starting party's capabilities), but you never know when you'll run across an encounter you just can't handle. This module is built around the idea that the "save cheat" is okay to use. You are encouraged to save a lot, and reload the game if an encounter really goes against you. For that matter, given that you'll going to be putting in a good chuck of time for those first few levels (trust me, as you get to higher levels, the rate of advancement will speed up), don't just settle for any only "level up" roll at the Review Board. Keep reloading until you get a good hit point roll (and/or an increase to a stat that isn't utterly worthless to you) for your front-liners, and a good spell point roll for your mages.
There's another reason to save it a lot. Game's still in beta. I *promise* you there are bugs I haven't caught yet that will absolutely cause it to crash. Save frequently so that lucky loot roll you got - or that harrowing battle you narrowly won and got a decent chuck of XP (25 points per character!!!! Yay!) for doesn't vanish into the ether of a crash!
Hope you guys enjoy it!
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Story Complete to: Dungeon Level 2
Where I am: The first level of the dungeon. I've completely explored and mapped out the city. Apparently completely exploring the city is enough to net each character about 600-700 XP (if you have six characters and an empty slot for "extras"), so they're about 1/3 of the way to level 2. With a fully equipped party none of the city encounters was "difficult." The dungeon has a higher encounter rate and encounters involving multiple groups are more common, so XP should come a *bit* faster, and things should be a bit more difficult... we'll see how it goes...
Last edited by caars on Sat Oct 28, 2017 3:34 am, edited 1 time in total.
Methuselas wrote:That group of orcs keep kicking my ass, Caars.....
The elf walked into the priest's office and said, "Can you cure me? It hurts whenever I do this?"
The priest said, "Well, don't do that..."
Update!
* Added a bit more to the first part of the city:
* The text warning you about the group of orcs now has them openly mocking you if you try to approach them before you are ready. You can still pay the toll to get past, but they try to make it clearer the better choice is to just turn around and go south...
* The warning text should now only show up once after the party is fully equipped and (potentially) a match for the orcs. Also, they won't mock you at that point for being weak and unequipped.
* Added a clue to make it more obvious you are supposed to go into a building to find Garth...
* The spell list is now complete! All seven levels of Conjurer, Magician, Sorcerer, Wizard, and Archmage are available. A few notes:
1. The spell list is based on Destiny Night. Virtually every spell "code" is identical - although there were a few where the "code" actually stands for a different spell (but the "new" spell has the same "class" and "level"). In almost every case the "altered" spell does something thematically similar to its original version (the original being something I can't yet do).
2. Just so that you know, *almost* all combat spells actually scale with caster level. At the level where you first get them they will be at least similar in power to their BT2 counterpart, but as you gain levels, they'll get stronger...
3. Yes, the dreamspell is in the game (and it's still a level 7 sorcerer spell). Yes, it's basically an "I win" button (and only works in combat). No, the code isn't the same as in BT2, so if you want to know how to cast it before the code is revealed in game (like in BT2), you'll need to cheat...
4. Wind Hero and Wind Mage are not currently implemented: I never liked those (a mage making the illusion of other characters seemed weird to me), but I don't know what I want to replace them with. So the only level 7 sorcerer spell that you can use off the bat is mage malestrom.
5. Some of the summonings (illusion or otherwise) might have what they summon changed later on based on balance. Generally, "early" summons (i.e. conjurer) are very weak. Sorcerer are really middle of the road now ("wind dragon" is a white dragon, not a red one, and wind giant is a fire giant, not a storm giant. The wizard summons are weak and level 1, but *rapidly* get a LOT stronger. I wanted wizards to really reward you for keeping a free slot in your party...
6. Wizard level 1 is the only exception to the "spells are from BT2" - the level 1 wizard spells are their BT1 equivalents - Summon Dead (sude) and Repel Dead (rede).
