NPCs on the second floor?

[Melinda]

Okay, so I am having way too much fun reprogramming the NPCs. What I want to do is start a rooftop restaurant in Empath Abbey (as well as use that second-floor podium). The problem is, that places on a second floor seem to have a vertical coordinate as well as an X and Y coordinate, but when I set the coordinates for the NPC business activity, they only let me enter X and Y, no Z. So is there a way to put that in there? There must be, since there was a guard and an NPC on the second floor of LB's castle.

Ideas?

[Vigil]

Actually, the upper-floor NPCs in LB's castle have no schedules - just patrol routes, which are handled differently. If you wait around long enough you'll notice that they stay there all day and night, never going off to sleep or eat. Poor things.

Anyway I think BG didn't allow a Z-coordinate for NPC schedules, which was why you almost never see characters on the second floors of buildings. I suspect Serpent Isle supports it though (Fawn and Moonshade have quite a few two-story buildings), but I haven't checked. If so then this feature should definitely be ported back into BG.

[1010101]

Even if SI didn't support it, I would suspect it could be implemented in Exult.

[drcode]

Yes, it's something we'd like to do (maybe soon). SI didn't support it either, but used 'monster' eggs to create 2nd-floor NPC's.

[Melinda]

Oh, I hope you do it soon - I'd be very grateful!

Maybe my rooftop restaurant dream will then become a reality. (And now I know why there are tables and chairs on top of Empath Abbey and yet the monks never sit there or eat there.)

[drcode]

This should be pretty easy. While I'm changing the format of the "schedules.dat" file, are there any other capabilities that would be useful? So far, I can think of:

1. Allow a z-coord in the position.
2. Allow more than 32 schedule ID's so we can add new schedules someday.
3. Allow schedule changes more often than the 3-hour blocks we currently support.

[Neutronium Dragon]

Probably too much work to add, but can you arrange for multiple possibilities in a given time slot?

That'd allow for characters that have schedules that vary from day to day, rather than doing the exact same thing every day.

Neutronium Dragon

[artaxerxes]

and possibly a schedule based on which day of the week we are.

For instance, Mon-Fri, the schedule would be set for "Work" and Sat and Sun would be more mundane activities.

Artaxerxes

[Dominus]

do we even have workdays?

[drcode]

I can't remember. Does U7 ever tell you the day of the week?

[artaxerxes]

that was a request I had somw weeks ago, about an intrinsic to get which day it is. I think I asked in the mailing list instead of the forum though...

Artaxerxes

[wjp]

I didn't see anything on the mailing list recently...

[artaxerxes]

well, it wasn't that recent... 27/July/2005...

Artaxerxes

[drcode]

Probably, I'll stick everything possible into the file format for schedules. Just don't expect anything other than the z-coord. to get supported right away. The other features would require a fair amount of changes to ExultStudio.

[olarin_cant_remember_passwords]

i recall at least one regular npc on a second floor once, in the original version of the game. the scholar in the lycaeum - i don't remember her name, but the one you can train intelligence with. i remember her being on the second floor of the lycaeum once.

i also distinctly remember, not long afterwards, her being on the roof of her house at night. so i think something went wrong somewhere in there.

[Neutronium Dragon]

There were those NPCs in the upper 'tower' in "Despise"/Shame as well - the ones plotting the attack on the castle. So it had some method of getting 'em up there - the same monster spawn egg trick, just not as widely employed?

Neutronium Dragon

[Dominus]

those guys in the tower weren't scheduled probably, or the tower is not actually that high but placed elsewhere on the map (can't remember).

About the Lycaeum, I think schedules could be tweaked to be on the 2nd floor if the object needed for the schedule (e.g. schedule sleep -> bed is needed) was at those coordinates but on another floor. I think I witnessed something like this when I built the church on the SF island patch...

[drcode]

Yes, I think the 'plotters' were created by eggs. It might also be possible to set an NPC on the second floor, but not give him any schedules.

Anyway, I should have support for setting a z-coord in schedules done in a day or two.

[drcode]

Okay, it's in (the z-coord support). Give it a try in the next snapshot.

[Melinda]

Okay, I've downloaded the new snapshot, but the z-coord does not show up in the schedules in the cheat menu (it does in Exult Studio, though). Is it supposed to be like that? Or am I doing something wrong?

[Dominus]

yup, cheat menu is not really a finished product. When editing the world use Exult Studio.

[Melinda]

Okay. I've read the studio faq, and it says to have the game open when running studio. So open the game, try to open studio, and get this error:

"Error in LIBGTK-Win32-2.0-0.dll" which pops up in a window and it crashes. How can I fix it? Studio will run if the game isn't running.

[Melinda]

Er. Now Studio won't run. It ran before, by itself, but it won't run if the game is loaded first, and now it won't run at all. I uninstalled and then reinstalled it, and it did the same thing again.

[Gunnar]

From the Studio docs

2.2. Running Exult Studio
You can run Exult Studio all by itself, but it isn't useful that way, as it uses Exult as a server. What you really want to do is:

Run Exult in windowed mode (not fullscreen).
Enable the Exult cheat mode (see Documentation).
Press 'alt+ctrl+m' to go into 'map-editor' mode. If all is set up correctly, exult_studio will start up, and will have a list of files on the left side of its window.

[Dominus]

Melinda, what version of Windows are you using? Are you using latest snapshot of Exult?

[Melinda]

I am using WinME and the latest snapshot of Exult. The game itself has worked perfectly so far - most of my savedgames were made with the old (stable) version, and they work fine.

When I uninstalled Studio, opened Exult, and installed Studio again while Exult was actually running, it did sort of work...I say sort of, because I got into map mode in Exult, clicked on the NPC I wanted to modify, and Studio opened...but there was only the file listing on the left side and a blank window on the right instead of the character info box.

Then after I closed everything down and restarted the computer, it did the same error message when I tried to start Studio. Exult itself will run without problems.

I installed Studio again and this time ran it without Exult running. It started, but did the same blank window thing. I pointed it to a savedgame and it said it couldn't find shapes.vga and another file (think it was a palette file?) and then crashed out.

It's installed in the same folder as Exult as per the documentation. I don't know what else to try.

[Dominus]

Sorry, the documentation is out of date. Windows 9x (95,98,98SE,ME) is no longer working and Windows 2000 probably not working as well

[Melinda]

So it only works on WinXP?

That's a big problem, as I can't upgrade to xp for some time...I might be able to get win2k, but if it doesn't work on that one either... (

Is there a way you guys can fix the in-game cheat menu to put in the z coordinates? That would solve my problem at least for now till I can get an upgraded OS...

[drcode]

How about Linux?:-)

But I have been wondering why ES on Windows has problems.

[Dominus]

The problem with Windows 9x is that the communication between Exult and ES was only a kind of hack for Windows 9x. This got kind of unmaintainable since no one uses Windows 9x anymore (no one of those that worked on it, meaning Colourless and Kirben( what Marc Siewart does is amystery to me ).
The problem with W2k is that it was kind of hard to pinpoint the problem, again because none of the relevant people use it anymore.

The details of how Exult and ES communicate in NT5.x and Windows 9x have to be answered by Colourless. I forgot all of it.

[Colourless]

Use Named Pipes for communications in NT and a hack using mailslots in Win9x

[drcode]

Would it make sense to use sockets everywhere? I know we currently use Unix-only sockets, but that's because I didn't know what I was doing:-)

[Colourless]

Sockets and Winsock are different enough that there probably isn't much point.