The Adventurers' Guild

The elemental weaknesses were only used in BT3. The list I uploaded is from an attempt to consolidate all of the items and monsters into one data structure across the three games.

drifting wrote: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.

People keep telling me my engine isn't sufficient for their needs. So they go off to build their own. At the end of the day, we hear nothing more and btbuilder adds more functionality. (ZeroZero is the other person who has talked about building his own engine.)

I do wish you luck on your project. What idiosyncrasies do you need to implement that would be too destructive for btbuilder? I'm not really interested in adding the idiosyncrasies but I'm curious.

Hi Dulsi,

I was talking about making editors to create standard formats for maps, events, characters, spells, items, monsters etc. to be used by other engines.

Since I badly lack free time since then and since I didn't receive any usable feedback I gave up on that project.

Actually I am thinking (and only thinking) about an MMORPG / BT hybrid. It should work like this:

Each player plays a BT like party instead of one char. Campaigns can be started anywhere on a huge global map. Parties can wander around and meet, fight etc. One spot there could be, that the party is mysterically teleported to a town called Scara Brae, from that they couldn't escape unless they kill the bad magician Mangar.

This is only a very early draft in mind, and I doubt I find the time to think it through the end or even code the server clusters needed.

dulsi wrote:People keep telling me my engine isn't sufficient for their needs. So they go off to build their own. At the end of the day, we hear nothing more and btbuilder adds more functionality.

And you almost certainly won't hear anything more about it. It's always been for my enjoyment of coding it.

dulsi wrote:I do wish you luck on your project. What idiosyncrasies do you need to implement that would be too destructive for btbuilder? I'm not really interested in adding the idiosyncrasies but I'm curious.

Each version has slightly different combat mechanisms. There are bugs and bug fixes among the different versions. Each game lays out the city, dungeon and wild views a bit differently. Things like that. Coding those into btbuilder would be a royal pain.

ZeroZero: You talked about how you were going to use opengl for rendering so that nighttime would use the same textures but less light. It seemed to me you were talking about building your own game engine. As for the lack of free time and usable feedback, I have that all the time. A lot of the feedback I've gotten is "I'll look at it when it's finished". You need to just decide it's important enough for you to want to do it.

drifting: I hate developing things that no one ever sees. It's why I couldn't wait to get out of college and working on real programs. I hope you decide to make whatever you come up with available somewhere. I am a little confused by your project. Why create a consolidated item/monster list if you want to implement all the idiosyncrasies of the old versions? Why would you use your engine versus just running the originals?

The monster, item, spell, etc lists were only created because I was trying to create consistent data structures across the games. The different versions can have their own lists although this data is generally consistent through the versions.

dulsi wrote:Why would you use your engine versus just running the originals?

I don't expect anyone would use my engine versus running the originals. That's never been my goal.

drifting wrote:https://github.com/downloads/ChrisAubuc ... _mons.html
https://github.com/downloads/ChrisAubuc ... items.html
https://github.com/downloads/ChrisAubuc ... _mons.html
https://github.com/downloads/ChrisAubuc ... items.html
https://github.com/downloads/ChrisAubuc ... _mons.html
https://github.com/downloads/ChrisAubuc ... items.html

It's not particularly pretty but all of the data is there.

Is there any chance you could repost these? They went away and I'm trying to double-check my BT2 data extracts, since I appear to have made a few errors in interpreting the data I found.

Thanks!

Methuselas wrote:

drifting wrote:The monster, item, spell, etc lists were only created because I was trying to create consistent data structures across the games. The different versions can have their own lists although this data is generally consistent through the versions.

Hey Drifting,

Do you have html dumps of the spells? I always wanted to know what the bonus was for certain spells, like BASK and OGST.

I don't have the spells in html. Right now they are auto-generated into JSON. If that will help I can get those to you. If not, it'll take me a few days to generate HTML.

offsides wrote:

drifting wrote:https://github.com/downloads/ChrisAubuc ... _mons.html
https://github.com/downloads/ChrisAubuc ... items.html
https://github.com/downloads/ChrisAubuc ... _mons.html
https://github.com/downloads/ChrisAubuc ... items.html
https://github.com/downloads/ChrisAubuc ... _mons.html
https://github.com/downloads/ChrisAubuc ... items.html

It's not particularly pretty but all of the data is there.

Is there any chance you could repost these? They went away and I'm trying to double-check my BT2 data extracts, since I appear to have made a few errors in interpreting the data I found.

Thanks!

I lost the script to generate those and they were out of date and incorrect so I removed them. It'll take me a few days to get something together. github doesn't support downloads like that anymore though so I'll have to find some place to host them.

Methuselas wrote:I can wait. I'm in no hurry.

Same here. Thanks for the effort!

drifting wrote:https://github.com/downloads/ChrisAubuc ... thiefp.exe

Fixes:

• Lights now stay on after entering an anti-magic square
• Fixed the Sorcerer Sight spell
• Fixed monster rosters for levels.
• Fizzle spells that are cast while on an anti-magic square
• Print full spell name under Known Spells in magic user character screen
• Fixed the "outdoor" dungeon levels. Sacred Grove, Tar Quarry and Shadow Canyon now use the outdoor background and a light spell is not required.
• Added scroll speed commands to battle text as in BT1 and BT2. Use '>' or '.' to speed up and '<' or ',' to slow down

I think that's all of the issues with the DOS version from this forum. If there are any others let me know and I'll get them fixed.

Hi, a user over at RPG codex is inquiring about how to use this patch (his user account here is pending admin approval)and I noticed that the link to this patch is no longer working and archive.org doesn't seem to have an archive of it. I looked to see if the patch was listed in the main download page , but the only patch listed there is the official crack from interplay which removes the need for the codewheel. So does anyone have the thiefp.exe patch?

dragonbait wrote: Hi, a user over at RPG codex is inquiring about how to use this patch (his user account here is pending admin approval)and I noticed that the link to this patch is no longer working and archive.org doesn't seem to have an archive of it. I looked to see if the patch was listed in the main download page , but the only patch listed there is the official crack from interplay which removes the need for the codewheel. So does anyone have the thiefp.exe patch?

Thank you for your help, Dragonbait.

The patch is at https://github.com/ChrisAubuchon/BT3-DOS-patch
But there are no instructions, and since the zip file contains more than just the pthief.exe file I figured it was safest to ask for instructions before playing.

My instincts were right 20+ years ago; the Amiga version was bugged, with the monsters having no special attacks, and I did the right thing in abandoning it. Hopefully this patch will make the equally bugged DOS version finally worth playing.

I'm guessing that since drifting linked directly to the .exe rather than the folder itself, that you would just need to put the .exe file in the bards tale III folder and type thiefp to start. It seems to boot up OK doing that. notice thiefp in the dosbox header.



If I'm missing a step, perhaps drifting or someone that's played this patched version could confirm.

dragonbait wrote:I'm guessing that since drifting linked directly to the .exe rather than the folder itself, that you would just need to put the .exe file in the bards tale III folder and type thiefp to start. It seems to boot up OK doing that. notice thiefp in the dosbox header.

That's correct. thiefp.exe is all that you need. The other files are used to create thiefp.exe.

Neat. Thanks drifting!