Messages

1

Editing A&A / Re: Questions regarding codebase

« on: October 26, 2016, 07:15:25 PM »

Items in store had mysteriously disappeared. It turns out that struct packing was not enabled in item descriptions, which caused a byte shift, which caused the item to be not found as usable for the current class.

Not anymore!

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Editing A&A / Re: Quest Pack 10 - The Sorcerer's Keep [WIP]

« on: October 26, 2016, 07:13:45 PM »

Awesome. Looking forward to it!

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Editing A&A / Re: Questions regarding codebase

« on: October 23, 2016, 08:46:16 AM »

Figured out the issue. It was a combination of late night programming and file size issues. I was allocating memory for resource structs based on the information coming from file, which was (obviously, in hindsight) wrong, since it was built using another platform.

Oh boy.



Edit: Aaand hacked something together. Simple type mistake cost me a couple of hours though.



Edit 2: Somehow the pictures are not being displayed. I can see them being loaded by comparing the hex headers with SLADE, but somehow they are not drawn...



Published my fork at this address: https://github.com/emrecelikten/AmuletsArmor

Edit 3: Got it somewhat working. Keyboard doesn't really work at the moment. Mouse is barely working.

It was caused by (presumably) very old GNU C compiler-specific setting in the code where an array was initialized with one element instead of being empty, causing some memory addresses to shift by one. Therefore, if a picture was 320x200, it would become 0x320, which means no picture. GCC was silently passing that flag into the compilation.



Now character creation fails with memory corruption errors again. I think I have found the cause: https://github.com/ExiguusEntertainment/AmuletsArmor/blob/master/Source/OBJTYPE.C#L1073

This puts a 8-byte pointer to the sixth byte of a 10 byte record, overwriting the next record. Might have to rewrite sections of this, but not sure if I will see this problem in other places. There must be a way for a general solution for this kind of issues.

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Editing A&A / Re: Questions regarding codebase

« on: October 22, 2016, 08:50:05 PM »

Managed to work around the problem by implementing a custom deserializer for resources. Looks like I am getting them correctly now.

I heard the first thunder sound before crash (still no graphics ) but I am getting non-deterministic SIGABRT crashes now. Something is off regarding memory stuff, have to figure it out.

I have also seen that some pointers are being cast to 32 bit integers and then being passed to functions, only to be converted back to pointers again. I think this won't work in 64 bit systems as the size of a pointer should be 8 bytes... Will have to change function signatures I guess.

I am afraid of introducing some bugs that I will have a very hard time of solving, but it does not work now anyway.

5

Editing A&A / Re: Peewee Mod Fork 1.3.1

« on: October 21, 2016, 06:16:07 AM »

Strangely the wolves did not hit me back at all. I think I have "farmed" around 10-15 wolves. None of them did anything in return.

Another bug report would be the class descriptions for new classes in the new character creation screen, the one you see armor proficiencies and so on. There seems to be an issue with newlines, so the lines are concatenated somehow.

6

Editing A&A / Re: Questions regarding codebase

« on: October 21, 2016, 06:13:41 AM »

Yep. I hope he sees this thread.

I am basically porting A&A to OS X at the moment. Almost everything is already done by Lysle, but some issues remained (e.g. platform specific functions, includes, compiler shenanigans). I managed to compile it after pulling an all-nighter. Now it segfaults due to not being able to load resources properly.

I am also trying to target SDL2 at the moment, but since I could not see any graphics so far, I do not know if I succeeded setting up the graphics surfaces and such.

Also, I think I will be refactoring a lot of stuff. Currently moved the data from the Exe folder to some separate folders and managed to get a CMake build up for OS X. I will need to add platform-specific settings for Linux (which should be easy after OS X, it's *nix after all) and for Windows.

I had to disable some sections of the code (e.g. SOS library) as they seem to be hard to port. I was almost stuck with the assembly implementation of graphics functions as well since it seems to be MASM, but gratefully there were C alternatives using a compiler flag. Overall it's going better than I expected. I hope to provide some results soon. My only concern is the divergence of graphics branch and your mod fork with my changes, but I guess I can apply the changes over my edition.

Edit: To clarify the problem above, I am using almost completely vanilla RESOURCE.C files. The game crashes while trying to load the fonts from SAMPLE.RES.

7

Editing A&A / Questions regarding codebase

« on: October 21, 2016, 04:08:03 AM »

Hi, I will probably have some questions regarding the codebase, so I will be posting them here.

I think these are leftovers from some debugging? The function that is being called has an empty body.

https://github.com/ExiguusEntertainment/AmuletsArmor/blob/master/Source/FILE.C#L151

For some reason, I am unable to read RES files. It looks like reading the binary files directly to structs is failing somehow. The second element in the index gets garbled, its name field does not have the correct information, etc. My guess is that it is probably due to struct packing issues between different compilers.

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Editing A&A / Re: Peewee Mod Fork 1.3.1

« on: October 19, 2016, 04:03:55 PM »

Apparently too long class rank text does not fit into that text box? It seems to be truncated as"Sect Of". (see screenshot)

Also it seems possible to gain experience by repeatedly summoning and killing your wolves.

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Editing A&A / Re: Peewee Mod Fork 1.3.1

« on: October 16, 2016, 05:22:34 PM »

The limiting factor is that a lot of neutral spells are very cheap, and there's going to be a tough balance between giving too much XP (so that blasting push before killing a monster is the best way to gain levels) and giving too little XP (so that spells like slow and dispell magic don't give enough of a reward for their usefulness). 

I slightly disagree with neutral spells being too easy to cast though. Unless you are playing one of the classes with good regeneration, it is not really possible to repeatedly cast spells to get experience.

I think poison should not give experience as well, as I stated in my previous post. I completely agree with your points - the tradeoff is easy combat versus experience, as you said.

Spells like Fly usually require lots of energy to cast, so there could be a small amount of experience gain I guess.

Some suggestions:
You might want to reduce the amount of loot in the new quests. I feel I received too much good equipment too soon. Some stuff that I would get around Q4-Q5 was in the first quests if I remember correctly. (e.g. the mage runes)

Also I managed to kill the big monsters in that town invasion quest using poison hands and a standard dagger. Took more than 20 minutes as a low level mage, but I think their AI needs to be changed slightly, because they stop hitting you if you push them into a corner and keep beating them.

Slightly off-topic (question also for Lysie): What is the current decision regarding a higher resolution option? I remember that there were some work done on it around 2013, along with Lua integration.

10

Editing A&A / Re: Peewee Mod Fork 1.3.1

« on: October 13, 2016, 05:07:57 AM »

Looking forward to it.

Also, here is a suggestion: It might be a good idea to track indirect damage from player and give experience for that as well. I have tested out the necromancer and apparently the summoned monsters do not give experience, which makes them almost useless early game as you cannot level up.

I am not sure about poison experience though, as it might be possible to abuse it by repeatedly poisoning monsters and running away from them, killing them without any trouble.

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Editing A&A / Re: Peewee Mod Fork 1.3.1

« on: September 30, 2016, 01:24:38 AM »

Just wanted to say thanks for making this. I am loving the new quests so far.

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Hints, Cheats, Tips & walkthroughs / Three switches at the end of Elmore's Retreat

« on: September 30, 2016, 01:19:45 AM »

I am curious about what the three switches at the end of Elmore's Retreat quest do.

Near the labyrinths, there are two different rooms with switches: The first one being 4-switch room that unlocks the treasure (if I remember correctly). And there is a second room with three switches. I hear some distant stone movement sound in a particular configuration but I was never able to find where that sound originates from.