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Post by Dave on Mar 17, 2008 1:08:11 GMT
Hi lacerated, thanks for the feedback. The "restart this book" crash is not good. I'm currently doing a rewrite of the code which will hopefully address such issues. Sorry about it, though.
Scrolling pages - currently you can use the arrow keys, but a page up/down function is a great idea. I'll incorporate it into the next release. Any suggestions for a pair of keys for the left side? (Not that it really needs it, since the left side is usually just action chart...)
undo option: not a chance on this one. You can however, choose "User-determined save games" in the gameplay options as you start a campaign. This will allow you to save your game before a big fight, or random number, if you want to do that sort of thing. (you can restore to your save point, if things turned out poorly.)
map viewer - are you suggesting something beyond the current method of viewing maps(choosing the "use" icon in the special items portion of the action chart)? If so, please give me a more specific idea of what you'd like to see.
Starting over w/stats in book 1 - This is a good idea. I don't see an easy way to implement it, however. Once you make it past the first book, your campaign is saved between books. At least there is that. Actually, I could create a campaign-like save point when the player opens up the section text - which means that the player would have the same stats, but also the same starting equipment and disciplines. Doesn't sound too useful, does it?
not healing past 20 EP: You must have sustained some damage from a button like "Lose 4 Endurance points", or something like that, which is not considered combat damage. Healing does work - you have two different options for its application in the gameplay options.
Section 88: I guess we shouldn't take the poor guy's spear, should we?! I was just going by the way it was capitalized. Capitalized items are generally ones you can take... but I think you're right here.
Ability to remove Kai disciplines... : What are you saying here? Are you saying that the user shouldn't be able to do this? or that they should? (They currently can, so I'm assuming you mean the former.) Can you give me a good reason? I wanted people to be able to see which disciplines they had, and realize that maybe they needed a different balance of disciplines and be able to make that, instead of the ridiculous option of making them restart the entire book, and generate new stats, just so they can choose Mindblast instead of Animal Kinship, or whatever. Have I misunderstood your intent?
book 2, sec 194 - You were right, only one choice was possible! Big oops on my part. I will upload a fixed file later tonight. (And the footnote had nothing to do with it.)
book 2, sec 238 - yes, the token has no effect on the action chart... perhaps it would be best to give the player an item, and have it disappear once they start betting. I'm confused by what you said about an "item icon", though. Could you explain this?
Thanks again for the feedback and good bug reports.
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Post by Dave on Mar 17, 2008 1:20:11 GMT
Found bug in Fire on the Water, section 346: When I chose to eat a meal from my backpack (instead of paying 1 Gold Crown) I was directed to section 205. I had the money for the room (10 GC) but just did not want to pay for the meal. The program is fantastic. Keep up the good work! I have been unable to reproduce this bug... All of my tests have shown correct behavior here. Ugh. Sorry, sendorian, but I can't fix it, since it seems to me to be working perfectly! Alas! Fire on the Water section 106 allows you to fight the Helghast without the Magic Spear. I had no weapon when I got to that section so the program gave me a 4 point penalty for being unarmed. It wouldn't allow me to pick up the Magic Spear until after I won the fight. Without a magic weapon I should have been unable to harm the Helghast. I shall change it so that you can pick up the magic spear before the fight is over. That does make more sense, doesn't it?
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Post by majestic on Mar 17, 2008 2:44:56 GMT
Hi lacerated, thanks for the feedback. The "restart this book" crash is not good. I'm currently doing a rewrite of the code which will hopefully address such issues. Sorry about it, though. Hi Dave, that crash seems to happen if you restart immediately back-to-back in FOTD (if you haven't been able to recreate the conditions). Maybe use Shift-PageUp and Shift-PageDown for the left side and PageUp/PageDown for the right? Or kind of like how you currently have it with the arrow keys being determined by the mouse? Or Home/End for the left side and PageUp/PageDown for the right? Your reply on the gameplay options leads to another question, I tried to modify those options prior to starting Section 1 of Book 1, but the options weren't changeable. Does the user have to modify them prior to selecting "I Agree"? Maybe I need to edit the options.txt file as the program just shows the gameplay options? I'll play around some more when I need to restart or when I finish Book 2. Just prior to your reply, I found the map feature in the Special Items section. I was expecting the map to be located maybe as a tab (like Backpack) or located in the TOC itself. That's kind of like what I was thinking for each book prior to the user starting Section 1 (esp. since I haven't figured out how to access the gameplay save option yet.) Yes, that's what I figured. It was quite late, and I probably skimmed over the text where non-combat damage occurred. Let me explain it this way, a reader is starting a new game and accidentally clicks on Animal Kinship, but really wanted Mindblast instead. I didn't see the ability to remove the newly added Kai discipline despite not starting Section 1. I think that would be a nice-to-have feature that can be worked around with that in-game save feature. Sorry, I meant clicking on the Token icon didn't seem to affect the Action Chart for me. Thanks for writing the great program. I have an idea for a cheat mode feature that is only activated when the user beats a book, which would allow the user to have access to all the sections in the TOC. Or allow the user to restart the book with all the paths in a section available, but no modifications are made to the campaign stats (that were previously saved upon completion). I hope you have an editor of sorts for creating new books. Can't be too fun if you are doing everything by hand.
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Post by Dave on Mar 17, 2008 2:53:32 GMT
Okay, I have posted the latest fix for the current version. The following issues are fixed:
Misspelled Guardian on action chart: fixed Book 2, sec 194 - only one section choice available: fixed Book 2, sec 106 - not able to pick up Magic Spear for combat: fixed Book 1, sec 88 - can loot the poor soldier's Spear: fixed
Okay, that's the latest bugfix for now. Enjoy! And as always, please let me know about any bugs you find!
Remember, if you downloaded the SSLW.exe (installer) and try to update it with just the SSLW-core.exe, it will erase your Project Aon book .zip files! So, either download the full SSLW, or just rename the .zips before updating with SSLW-core, and rename them back after updating. Yes, dumb installation software. I've found a much better solution for the next major release.
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Post by Dave on Mar 17, 2008 3:14:31 GMT
Yes, I've seen it now. However, it's not an easy fix, and since I'm re-writing a bunch of stuff from ground up, with much more foresight this time, I'm hoping to eradicate this issue in the next version. All very good ideas. I may implement any (or all!) of them for the next version.
Actually, when you click the "Start a New Campaign" button in the very first menu, you are taken to a screen where you can choose the book you want to start on... At the top of this menu is the button "Choose Gameplay Options" - this is where and when you select those options.
(Glad you found the map. I did it this way, so that if you lose the map, you can't look at it!)
No need for a work around - it's already there. When the button turns blue after you click it (the "Choose" button), another click will remove that discipline from your action chart. Once you begin reading Section 1, however, the buttons become gray, and you cannot reselect your disciplines after that.
Ah yes, it actually does do something internally when you click it, but that's not obvious to the player. In the future versions, I will have this show an inventory item, that is used when Lone Wolf begins betting.
Yes, the campaign stats are saved in a file. it's called campaign.dat. It is not user-readable or user-modifiable. Why it is like this is related to my answer to your next question.
If you read in my first post about the original reason I had for writing this program, you'll read that I wrote to prevent myself from cheating. I am not remotely interested in spending time developing a "cheating" feature - it was a big concession for me just to include a "user-initiated save", which can be very much abused as cheat feature, which is why I insist that people choose it before they begin the campaign, and then they cannot change the option unless they start a new campaign. Sorry, not gonna happen, at least not for a long time.
Don't worry, I do. I realized early on it would be a nightmare to do it by hand. I am currently re-writing those development tools to be even more powerful and quicker to use, so that future books are even easier and faster to finish.
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Post by majestic on Mar 17, 2008 4:04:42 GMT
I see this now, it's above the book titles. Intuitively, I thought it would be next to the two buttons on the bottom as the top placement reminded me of a title. Just found this and was about to edit my post, when I saw your reply. I was looking on the Action Chart for a way to remove it. Did a directory comparison and found the 2 save files. FYI, when I modified the AllowMidSaves=1 in options.txt, it overrode the 0 value that's in the campaign.dat. I see. Since I didn't see a visible change, I stopped clicking it whenever I restarted the book (avoiding CTS). Very understandable on your position regarding the cheat.
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Post by majestic on Mar 17, 2008 20:17:33 GMT
Just finished Book 3 with some more comments...
Counter stickiness bug: To recreate, save at Kai Disciplines page, and select a few equipments on the following page. Then restore game and you'll see old equipment counter values are sticky.
FOTW 269: Probably don't need to have Spear icon.
Double indentation: All lines of text other than the first indented lines have an additional indentation. (For example FOTW 87, "Tarnalin" indentation is not flushed with "Your" of the previous line.)
TCOK 10: Should Potion of Alether have the orange adjective like the other bottles? (No idea if Graveweed has an adjective as I didn't visit the Graveyard of the Ancients, so can't visit that path.)
Special Items limitation: Set to allow more than 12, but program allows only 13. (Have save files if interested.)
Footnote enhancement: Allow scrolling beyond the text limitation. What I mean is you have a list of footnotes. When you pick a footnote that's in the middle of the list, your program will show that footnote on top of the right reader side. However, when the section's footnote is the last entry, the program will not show the footnote at the top of the right side due to the lack of text following the footnote. Not sure if this would be easy to do.
Illustration enhancement: When the user clicks on a large illustration, it fills the entire right side with the caption just below the viewing area. Perhaps you can shrink the illustation just enough for the text to show or make the length a little longer to allow the illustration caption to be exposed? (TCOK 173 for example.)
Question: In the event that PA updates the text for a book, say fixes a typo that not action related. Do you have to revisit the book to make the changes to the sections? Or does your program search for a specific text string and generate the action icons appropriately?
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Post by Dave on Mar 22, 2008 15:37:22 GMT
Thanks for the post, lacerated:
"Counter stickiness bug:" This'll have to be addressed in the next version. It's related to saving the game state, and that will be changed significantly with next version, so we'll have to try this sort of thing again and see if it still happens.
"FOTW 269:(Probably don't need to have Spear icon.)" Please tell me why you think this. I may agree, but I'd need a reason.
"Double indentation:" What you are referring to is a result of PA formatting the death notice as a choice! If you notice in the books, all choices are indented, with subsequent lines indented further. I could override this manually - Do you think having the text centered or simply left aligned (with the "Your life and mission has ended here"-type of statements) would be better?
"Should Potion of Alether have the orange adjective like the other bottles?" Graveweed does indeed have Black as its adjective. I'm going off of the choices given later in the game which read like the following: If you have a potion of Red Laumspur, If you have a potion of Green Gallowbrush, and if you have a potion of Black Graveweed... It never asks for a potion of Orange Alether as such, but perhaps for consistency with the other potions from this part of the book, "Orange Alether" would be best.
"Special Items limitation:" This is being refigured for next version. Though, some special items do not count toward the SI limit (You see this a lot in later books - mission specific items given at the beginning of books, for instance, so I gave that attribute to the Seal of Hammerdal, and maybe one or two others...)
"Footnote enhancement:" What you described wouldn't be easy, but since I will be re-doing the footnotes for next version, so that footnotes appear on the page along with the section text, this will no longer be an issue.
"Illustration enhancement:" What you describe sounds good in theory, but is not good in practice, because of the variability of text font sizes and length of captions. It is entirely conceivable that a user might set a large, easy to read font size, and open an illustration which has a long caption. With your idea, half of the page or more could be taken up by text, which leaves only enough for a very small, undetailed picture(which they already get in the main section text!) Since my intent was to provide an enlarged illustration so viewers could see the details of the fine artwork, I think it's best to stick with making the picture just large enough to fit on the page, and have any captions follow that. Does that make sense?
If it is minor, such as a simple spelling correction, it will not affect the game at all. If it's larger, such as removing or adding text, then I would have to re-do that section(though not necessarily from scratch.) Unfortunately, with the excessive variations of text and rules, there is not much automation that can be done, though for my next version, I will be attempting to add as much automation as possible, based on my experience with the first 3 books(I know better now what things could speed up the process of getting a book ready to play in my program.)
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Post by majestic on Mar 22, 2008 19:11:10 GMT
Hi Dave, thanks for getting back to my posts. "FOTW 269:(Probably don't need to have Spear icon.)" Please tell me why you think this. I may agree, but I'd need a reason. I just did a quick check and I believe LW has the Magic Spear on all paths leading to Section 269 already. Thus, it seems redundant to have the Spear icon on this section as well. I thought the subsequent lines' double-indentation was the result of Seventh Sense? Maybe we are using different HTML browers and they are displaying the HTML pages differently? (I'm using Firefox, BTW.) For me, PA www.projectaon.org/xhtml/lw/02fotw/sect87.htmshows (the underscore characters are the indentations): __Your mission and your life come to a tragic end here in __Tarnalin. and Seventh Sense showed something like: __Your mission and your life come to a tragic end here in ____Tarnalin. I thought it would be better to match PA's. It just stood out when I grabbed the Alether Potion and it didn't have an adjective in front of it like the others. Your call on this. Sounds good. Would it be easy to implement a feature to additionally show the illustration text like a tooltip, which floats over the illustration with the mouse hovering over? Looking forward to Book 4.
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Post by Dave on Mar 22, 2008 21:34:50 GMT
Yes, that would be a good reason! I will correct this in future versions.
The discrepancy comes about because of the difference between PA's display and the original books. I have fashioned it so that "choices" (including the death notice, apparently) are indented as in the printed books I own: first line is 1 tab, any subsequent lines have 2 tabs... So, we're both right! That being said, I don't necessarily like PA's method, so unless you really think it's bothersome, I don't think I'll change the current style.
Yeah, I think I'll change this to read "Potion of Orange Alether: +5 CS"
Yes, easy as pie. Also, did you know that if you click the picture when on the large illustration page, it will display as large a version as it can fit on the screen? This is for the 2-page illustrations... like when you are told to look carefully at the illustration in Book 2 to determine who is the one trying to murder you - it's pretty small when crammed onto 1 page, so you can't see the necessary detail. I might need to rethink this method. It's rather inelegant. I'll see if I can temporarily stretch out the page as necessary.
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Post by majestic on Mar 22, 2008 22:06:06 GMT
Ah, you're right! That's how they are in my Pacer/Berkley books as well. I wouldn't have noticed the 2nd indentation if I wasn't using both 7th Sense and PA at the same time.
FYI, I like the Pacer styled logo for nostalgic reasons.
Implementing the tooltip for the illustration text would be great. I prefer not to mouse click whenever possible.
Yes, I did come across the 2nd mouse click largest display feature. It's nice.
I thought of an alternative method... Instead of clicking the mouse on the small illustrations to bring up the page-sized ones, maybe display the page-sized ones on the left panel simultaneously with the text on the right?
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Post by smakx on Mar 26, 2008 15:51:22 GMT
Hello, I had to quit lurking this forum and sign up just to thank you for this awesome reader. I have been having a blast playing with seventh sense, it is the ideal way of experiencing these great works. I have had a few friends get into Lone Wolf after seeing Seventh Sense running on my PC. I have also been playing Lone Wolf DS, which is also very nice. I think I prefer your reader slightly because of the game options available, and the fact that my monitor is much larger than the DS Thank you for all of your great work, I can't wait for more books. I also need to thank pa, but I suppose that goes elsewhere. I intend to donate to project aon and lw ds. Do you intend to setup a donation link for your project? I would like to help out, but I don't code or do grafic design work.
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Post by matthill on Mar 28, 2008 1:20:13 GMT
I've been lurking here for some time I too have just joined up. I also wanted to congratulate you on this great program: I've been wanting something like this for years, so much so that I've had several of my own attempts at doing the same, but being more a designer than a coder, they've never succeeded. Something that I'm curious about is the fact that you have to put a lot of effort into coding each book by hand. Given that PA create XML files of the books initially, wouldn't it make more sense to use the XML data as the core data that drives the engine? I don't know if it's detailed enough to be used as is, but if you could use the XML directly, you'd save a ton of time. Of course, I'm sure you've thought about that and there are probably good reasons why it can't be done. If so, I'm curious to know why. Anyway, thanks for the tool, it's great!
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Post by alderaine on Mar 28, 2008 9:39:48 GMT
The Aon XML format is geared towards laying out the page, rather than for navigation purposes. I can request support from the AON team if there is anything they can do to make our lives easier, but I suspect it is just as much work for them to prepare each XML for the programs as it is for us to work on it. Check out the Common Navigation File thread for information on how we are working towards a single file all programmers can use. There are a reasonable number of sections in each book with completely new/different navigation requirements, so there will always be some manual coding required.
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Post by Dave on Mar 28, 2008 17:00:51 GMT
Hello, I had to quit lurking this forum and sign up just to thank you for this awesome reader. I have been having a blast playing with seventh sense, it is the ideal way of experiencing these great works. I have had a few friends get into Lone Wolf after seeing Seventh Sense running on my PC. I have also been playing Lone Wolf DS, which is also very nice. I think I prefer your reader slightly because of the game options available, and the fact that my monitor is much larger than the DS Thank you for all of your great work, I can't wait for more books. I also need to thank pa, but I suppose that goes elsewhere. I intend to donate to project aon and lw ds. Do you intend to setup a donation link for your project? I would like to help out, but I don't code or do grafic design work. smakx, Thanks for your kind words. I'm glad your enjoy the program, and that your friends are interested in LW because of it. In terms of donations, I don't have anything set up currently, but perhaps I will create a webpage for my project here on the PA site. I'll be sure to include some sort of donations link. (Thanks for that, btw. You are very generous to donate to all of those projects!) matthill, I wanted something like this for years, too - since I was about 12! I've still got the original code for my BASIC version of Flight from the Dark. You go only about 3 choices into the adventure before it runs out of code and quits. When I set up that website, I'll post some of the screenshots from it. In regards to XML, alderaine hit it on the nose - the PA files really don't help much with navigation, or rather interpreting the rules that determine possible navigation, so that stuff has to be dealt with manually. Now that I've worked extensively on the first three books, I understand a lot more of what stuff can be automated, so I'm going to incorporate that into my next version of my development tools, which should considerably speed up the process of preparing the books for my program.
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