Exult Forum

Hi everyone! This isn't a spam topic from a robot, I promise! x) Hope y'all are well and remaining alive and healthy in the wake of the Corona virus. It feels like some kind of zombie apocalypse except everyone's eating toilet paper again. Alright.

So I just finished Glimmerscape again, (It's always just amazing. Serious props.) and I'm making my way through the SI Fixes mod. I constantly have Hack Mover on and am collecting literally every loose object I can find, (A'la Skyrim, of course. Packrat pride!) and eventually I realize I have far, far, FAR too many things in my bags.

So I do what any self-respecting game would do and build an entire house somewhere just to house all of their things. I mean, come on. It's about time that happened. So I'm playing around in the editor, seeing what's what, slowly ambling my way around the editor to learn its inner workings. I managed to make one of those raising/lowering steel gates that are tied to -two- switches. That's pretty neat. I'm currently sliding clear glass display cages onto fancy-looking tables, wondering why I bothered to encase a pinecone in glass, then "eh"ing my way into surrounding that pinecone with fancy heroic statues.

So, I suppose I have a few inquiries as to how the master house-builders go about doing this. I'm sure I'll have more questions at some point, and I really appreciate your input! ^_^

1) How do you go about making a house with two floors? What's the most helpful tip you have in building it, building INSIDE of it, and moving between them?

2) How the heck do you get house roofs right?

3) If I have to edit a chunk, do those edits apply to ALL chunks of that type? I found a house corner with clean stone walls and floors that I really like, but the very top left corner (Right under the black coordinate labels, sadly.) is a fragment of carpeting. I want to replace that tiny sliver of blue carpeting with some stone floors so it doesn't look ugly. So, if I do that, will all instances of that chunk in the world also change? Or just that one?

4) Are there versions of openable Shutters for every direction, or just for "up" and "right?" Because I've got shutters opening -into- my house at this point.

5) How do I make a lever toggle one of those secret walls with the little square on it to differentiate it from other non-secret walls? I want to use a lever and not have the player be able to double-click on the wall to open it.

6) If it ever happens that I'm dragging and dropping wall segments into place, and some of the walls "in back" seem to overlap the ones that are isometrically in front, almost like one of those MC Escher visual anomalies, what's the best way to remedy that so it doesn't look like there are layer schenanigans? All of the pieces are indeed on the same heightplane.

7) Is there a way to make fire fields hurt when you walk through them?

8) Can I edit individual instances of placed NPC Shapes to be their own NPC, or does each individual NPC need to have its own Shape? Not sure if my question makes sense. Basically, if I put down a Goblin King shape and I double-click on it, I have surprisingly few options. ... I think. I should revisit that to see if that's accurate.

9) Is there a way to build a two-story house easily and quickly? What about placing floors? How about making walls that are two stories high but still look like they have a smooth transition between the two vertical pieces? I was looking in the Monitor crematorium for inspiration and I see that it doesn't look that smooth between the two vertical layers.

Thanks for the tips! Much appreciated! I'll show off the different stages of my house when I can.

I just read the manual and answered #3 (About the Chunks) for myself. Amazing how beneath the parts on the pre-made chunks there's these holes in he floor. Guess they never bothered filling in the floors there. Why would they have to?

It's dawning on me that question #1 and #9 look the same, but in theory, they're not. The first question inquires about the basic logistics of making a second story floor when everything is designed to be built on ground level. Do we really have to manually edit the height of every single object that we place? Do we rely on the "Edit Lift" feature in the Map Editor other window?

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So, regarding #5 above, I just put down two of those floor levers, both of which match the secret door's quality, as 252. The weird thing is, one of the levers gives me a red "x" and the other works fine, though neither toggle the secret door.

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Take a look at this weirdness here.
https://i.imgur.com/w983jKk.png

I'm really not quite sure what's happening here. When I reload the game, these wall pieces circled in red appear all over the house. They're definitely not being put here by me. Anyone have any idea what's going on?

Worse yet, when I manually delete them in Exult Studio (Because they just appeared there where there was floor..) now there's a black square beneath them as if there was never any floor under them. It's the weirdest thing...

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How does a fella view the Usecode? Regarding it, following the bits in the manual that I'll quote here momentarily, what would the actual "Target" field of the program's shortcut look like to achieve things, please? What would an example look like if I wanted to extract all of "Usecode" to "C:\SI" ?


-o
write output to

-I
add to the include path

-s
compile for SI. Usecode for SI needs to be compiled with this option.

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Also, just for fun - I'm building this house immediately north of Gustacio's House in Moonshade in Serpent Isle. After I got this far, I'm getting Melino and Columna constantly wandering over and opening and then shutting my house's shutters. I appreciated their help, though only for a few moments before it got annoying, (They CONSTANTLY did it. They both left their house for the sole purpose of opening my shutters.) So I did what any warm-blooded American would do and put them on the roof.

Blasted Mages instantly appeared back at their little cauldron mixing potions and reading books in the wrong direction.

1. just like you would a real house Build the ground floor, then build the floor of the 1st floor, walls,etc.

2. copy/paste from existing houses http://exult.info/studio.php#combo_edit

3. yes, it applies to all chunks. So if you want to change a chunk, make a copy of that chunk and edit that copy.

7. they should hurt you

8. no idea what you mean. You can take any shape and assign a new NPC number/usecode to it.

9. again combos. If you select more than one shape, you can edit all of their lift at once.

As for your picture, no idea. it looks as if you took a chunk but didn't view all of what's there. or you edited the same chunk elsewhere and it got applied to all chunks.

One big hint: place doors on the south and east walls only

Heheh, thank you! Much appreciated. The more I'm reading the manual for everything, the more I'm realizing that building Combos is indeed the way to go. I haven't done it yet, but are Combos able to be edited all at once like one giant object? That would be superbly helpful. That means I can build the floor of entire second floor of the house and move it up and down as one piece. Imagine adjusting the floor of a whole house that size piece by piece. Yikes.

I did make a new NPC from the "Stone Harpy" template. I set them to be a Shopkeeper type. I can't wait to see what they do in the house. I'll be putting down a few Cat shopkeepers too, because of course I would. Now I just need to learn to use Usecode and make them actually speak. I'll take a look at some shopkeepers to see what they're like.

In my post above, I had a few more inquiries and comments. One of them is about how to actually "unpack" the Usecode for viewing. I'll assume it must be repacked in order to be seen by Exult? Or can I just copy what the Mods are doing. This is just practice for myself, really, so I'm not distributing this publicly. I just REALLY needed a huge and stupidly elaborate house to keep my things in. You see the display cases and all.

As for the door being on the west side, I'll be constructing an awning just in front of the door so people can see the door when they walk under the awning. The button for the door is just to its left, so I'm not worried about that.

So what triggers those secret walls, anyway? - The ones you can double-click to have it rotate open like a door? (Like Filbercio's treasure room, or Melino's door to his weird garden outside his house.) - Except if you want a lever to power them and not to be able to double click on it. Is that a separate Shape altogether, even though it looks like a double-clickable secret wall?

I have to admit that those questions I didn't answer, I can't really answer
I suggest you open a BG game and then inspect the levers and doors witht Exult Studio to learn more.

Combos or a "cluster" of objects (I think mark one object then keep holding ctrl while you mark more) can be moved, copied, pasted with ctrl+ combos http://exult.info/docs.php#studio_keys

I am indeed experimenting with Combos. They're pretty neat as a concept.

What I really have to actually remember to do is to save my progress in Exult. I actually lost all wall and floor related progress on a gigantic mansion I'm making just north of Trinsic. Ah well. Live and learn. ... or at least, remember. Actually it crashed mid-construction. I should probably do this in a new game file so I don't have Iolo with literally two thousand food items in his backpack. That can't be good.

But my real problem right now, if it can even be described as one, is that Ctrl-Alt-M no longer works to open the map editor or change game mode from editor to "Play" mode. No idea why it stopped working. It doesn't work in Serpent Isle either.

did you disable the cheat mode?

Just tossing this out there, just in case. I had Ctrl+Alt+M not working either, thanks to Nvidia Geforce Experience.
If you have this installed as well, go to the settings of that program and bind that program's Ctrl+Alt+M shotcut to something else.

Dominus - It's possible to disable cheat mode? Ew. That's practically cuss words in my dictionary. x) Heh. They're perfectly enabled, safe and sound. I didn't think of that though. Good call.

Gotcha - Thanks for the tip! That's exactly it. I went in there, found the settings, and changed all of those pesky Keyboard shortcuts that have invaded my life into Ctrl-Shift+ and now the problem is gone. I would never have thought of this. I never even opened the Geforce experience; just stuffed it away into an unused folder. Many thanks!

Let me guess - Doom Eternal, right?

Glad that was it!
I wouldn't have thought about it either, but back then something Dominus said poked my memory. I blamed Windows 10 at first, since the shortcut stopped working after it forced an update on me. That was just a coincidence.

Not sure what you mean with Doom Eternal.

Doom Eternal is that new Doom game they just released. I was required to download an NVIDIA graphics card update to play it, and that's basically what caused the issue I had described with Ctrl-Alt-M. Thanks again for the tip! ^-^

So I'm in the middle of building my house - In Black Gate this time, because why not.

It has two floors. I really have no plans for the actual layout of the house but I sure have a lot of goodies to openly display. The treasure room on top is filled with stuff I encountered on my adventures. The table with gold is about half of the gold I found, maybe. The gold bar room upstairs is all spawned in because why not.

The Dragon in the upper left corner is my pet Dragon. They love meat, milk, spilling milk all over the floor because they don't know how to hold on to buckets with their claws, and dancing. Yep, at 9:00 in the evening, they take to the dance floor and rapidly rotate. It's pretty awesome.

There are quite a few illusionary walls in and around the house. I definitely didn't hold back in that regard. There's a guard that spawns outside the treasure room and walks left and right, occasionally walking into the Unicorn statue and thinking about life and its mysteries.

The upstairs has a guard room and two bedrooms belonging to no one in particular. The downstairs has a little kitchen and humble dining area, and a study / sewing room. The lower right of the first floor has a secret entrance with a teleporter that leads nowhere because that's more fun than a teleporter that leads somewhere.

Let's see if these BB codes work. If not, just copy and paste the middle of the IMG tags into the browser.





Any suggestions on what to fill the second floor with?

I like the dirty diaper factory.
I'm not sure; it seems to me that your house is pretty filled with lots of stuff already. But hey, why not throw a pool on the roof while you're at it?

Makes me wonder if there are still issues with the game once a certain item number is reached? Or was that completely fixed with Exult?

no, Exult should be good with objects in the world.

Good to know!

I've written Usecode to make boats and houses out of "infrastructure as code".

4) Are there versions of openable Shutters for every direction, or just for "up" and "right?" Because I've got shutters opening -into- my house at this point.

Yes. I believe you may need to change the frame to get the correct direction. The code just cycles forward a frame or back.

5) How do I make a lever toggle one of those secret walls with the little square on it to differentiate it from other non-secret walls? I want to use a lever and not have the player be able to double-click on the wall to open it.

Set the value of the switch and secret wall to the same value.

6) If it ever happens that I'm dragging and dropping wall segments into place, and some of the walls "in back" seem to overlap the ones that are isometrically in front, almost like one of those MC Escher visual anomalies, what's the best way to remedy that so it doesn't look like there are layer shenanigans? All of the pieces are indeed on the same heightplane.

In some cases this is the Exult engine's handling. Placing the pieces in order so the further-back ones are first and the outer-nearer ones are later can help but not in all cases.

7) Is there a way to make fire fields hurt when you walk through them?

Did you copy the shape from one shape number to another? Did you set the same options in ES?

8) Can I edit individual instances of placed NPC Shapes to be their own NPC, or does each individual NPC need to have its own Shape? Not sure if my question makes sense. Basically, if I put down a Goblin King shape and I double-click on it, I have surprisingly few options. ... I think. I should revisit that to see if that's accurate.

You can reuse the shape. The key is to set the function number of the NPC.

One of the more interesting hacks they used in Usecode was to assign the NPC's behavior for single-use NPCs like the Goblin King to that shape, rather than use a function in the 0x400+ range where normal NPC functions live.

9) Is there a way to build a two-story house easily and quickly? What about placing floors? How about making walls that are two stories high but still look like they have a smooth transition between the two vertical pieces? I was looking in the Monitor crematorium for inspiration and I see that it doesn't look that smooth between the two vertical layers.

The game is has some graphical-size limitations due to being shipped on floppy disks. Also note there is a Z-limit of 15, so 3 story building are not possible.