Arcanum:WIP 2.2 (Beta) Now Available

It's not safe to leave your boat in Dernholm, it could get stolen. You must hide it

 

Let's see how many I can answer.

1) Pre-existing buildings. I have an idea in mind for those plus some new ones in the same area, but that's a ways down the road.

2) I've made a couple attempts at that but nothing has worked out - so far.

3) Reason #3 I added the graveyard there.

4) I'll have to check that out. Maybe when I rearranged the world map listing I added a glitch.
Edit: Yep! Trying to condense the listing is what caused it.

5) Part of the set-up for the Mad Scientist quest which includes the notes.
Still to be (re)done. The trap-door has been deleted.

6) The guy who got killed across the street lived there. His name was Louie and he was paid well for his ability to gather information but he left his bodyguard at home for some reason.
http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o314/rroyo/Arcanum/Answer01.jpg

7 & Eight) Ah, thanks for pointing those out. There are several other places where that's possible, but if you watch the citizens, that's how they hide at night.
(The number eight kept being displayed as a smiley!)

Edit: The first one has to remain as-is, but I did block 3 other places including the blacksmith's shop.
Note to all players: If the doorway doesn't light up, don't try going in there.

9) Yeah.... A cheat I forgot about. Jackpot, boys!

10) You're right, they're just milling around. The new facades won't let them walk in and out of buildings so I just gave them paths to wander around on.

11) Yep! It's a dead end! If you take a good look, that wall separates one farmer's field from another's. Which means you'll have to backtrack to get at the other field.
BTW: One of these days I'll be adding more and new hobbit-holes so a few of these fields will be changed around.

12) The dingy to Cattan is temporary. As soon as I get the two towns built, you'll be able to get there by booking passage or with your own ship.
Also - It's out of sight on your screen-shot, but you can see where the original shoreline was. I added the small bit for the landing so that the island is almost exactly as it was originally built.

13) It's on my to-do list but I want to get either Buccaneer's Cove or the yet-unnamed small Cattan town built first.

14) Way ahead of you. In each large area of Arcanum will be built a small town and a place you can take over like Lynchbany and the Big Woods Lodge to serve as a base of operations for that area.
Also: Funny you should point to that area. Just south of there will be a modest-sized river town in need of a hero.
To minimize the impact my additions will have on the leveling schemes, most of what I plan to add will be mid to late or even post game additions.
The northlands are going to get a little more crowded...

15) Until I learn hex-editing, this is the best I can do. Give them better weapons and greater numbers.

Frigo: That's not bad. Maybe once you leave your ship, the port master impounds it; claiming you're a tech smuggler.
I wonder how hard that would be to script.....

 

Anyone having a problem with the Big Woods Lodge not getting marked?
I am.....

 

Nope, not me. Shows up immediately when it's supposed to. Have you edited the original recently or is it just like our versions?

 

Thanks for the quick come-back and letting me know the good news.

Everything regarding Lynchbany is still untouched - for the most part.
After I posted I did some experimenting and learned the the map-marking is jumping two listings.
In order to get The Big Woods Lodge (#114) to come up, I had to reset Cerdo to mark the map for #116!

I think my Arcanum.exe is messing up. I'll reinstall and try again.

Edit: Problem solved.

 

Can't find the last concealed entrance to the treasure room part of Acererak's Tomb. Have cleared everything else... can see it from an adjacent tunnel, but no access.

 

Spoiler

There are two passages hidden as floor tiles.
One is in the hall that was split by the two doors. Take the one on the left. At the end of that hall is a room with 1 Speaker of Evil and 3 Bone Butchers. On the far right side of the room is a tapestry beside a collapsed section of wall. Mouse around the corner beneath the tapesty.

After you go through it and into the last room of the mini-maze - with 4 Greater Lich - mouse around under the right-side tapestry on the back wall.

I'm curious about how many others will have trouble with that.

BTW: When you finish the tomb, I'd like to know your opinion of it.
Good, bad, or otherwise.

 

Ok, my impressions on Acererak's Tomb :

It lived up to its promises of being long. The entire career's worth of treasure at the end makes me want to retire and become a permanent boarder at Madame Lil's.

I wasn't too much in favor of the length of it or the fact that it seemed to love empty space. The odds of seeing an adjacent tunnel were low. Alot of the traps seemed placed just to annoy, since there were no monsters anywhere near them to take advantage of a "trapped" player who runs faster than he thinks. The only reason for the long tunnel full of traps at the end of BMC was because Gudmond went nuts/paranoid and layed them all. Most other heavily trapped places have some rhyme or reason for traps being everywhere... Gudmund, the Trap master's practice room, the king's castle in caladon, trap master quest, etc. For that many traps, there should be a small party of AQ's contingent ahead of the player hoping to avoid more orc contact and holed up in there just short of cannibalism to survive. They could offer a quest to scout ahead because of a suspected shortcut out to freedom or escort back out, knowing that the coast is clear since you came in that way. Or if you are evil and have read the journal, that the orcs are RIGHT behind you, and they should flee in the opposite direction... thus using them as expendable decoys while moving forward. You could likewise employ player useable traps that can only be seen by +20 PE or sense invisible.. like a lever or something that disintegrates all the monsters in the big room next to you.. etc. Its all very very very linear as is... move forward, kill stuff... find next concealed passage.

Arcanum is ALL about options and easter eggs. I kept expecting to find AQ deep within the dungeon somewhere with the remnants of his party happy to pay me to do his dirty work or something. That, or an orc leader I could side with to wipe out AQ... being the idiot savant half orc that I currently am. There is too much, its too linear, its one dimentional... kill and move. I also found it odd that Acererak was miles away from his treasure room. Sure, he's an undead Lich now, what good will all that treasure do him now since he basically saught existence on a higher plane, not unlike kerghan. But still, if he's that detached from it now.. why is it so well protected... and so much of it? For something this big, one could expect a full Tarant's worth of quests in it. Instead of one humongous treasure room at the end which has almost no reason to be there, all monster types used should have mini bosses with a treasure along the way where the monster types change. Killing each boss should allow the player one new inventory item to keep the party going, or to aid in the end defeat of the big boss. Acererak didn't even pull with the other mobs surrounding him. Pretty stupid for a boss that is level 50. I was expecting him to be throwing out stuns or something deadly / annoying to present a challenge since he was a solo pull. Nada... he dropped faster than panties on a prom night.

Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that this game still EXISTS and has a community trying to improve it. I like your work in general, the addition of new monsters. I know there has been vociferous complaining about the game in general at times by people frustrated with it, but you have to stop and think, it is designed very very WELL. Everything has a REASON and a variety of options or methods. The whole thing feels more like an ongoing experiment in "what can I do with the game engine today by modding it" rather than something excrutiatingly designed and planned using the 3 guiding principles of Troika... DESIGN... art... code.

All that being said.. the spider cave is monotony defined. Just give us a bug hole nuke launcher schematic and be done with it.

Also, after reading the note after Lynchbany at the Big Woods Lodge, I assumed AQ was of the group that lynched ole' bany, and that finding him would lead to a resolution or quest to free bany and gain permanent drinking rights at his reopened Inn or something.

Brandybuck, on the otherhand, shows much promise. Very ambitious all in all for a WIP, but it needs focus, polish, economy of play in the bigger endeavors. Given the economy of play, make them all interior dungeons with townmap type travel where you cannot sleep mid dungeon unless there is a bed specifically there for that purpose. Nothing wrong with having an R&R station mid dungeon. It may sound like I'm complaining alot, but alpha/beta is the time for input. Thanks for the experience, I look forward to more!

 

And thanks for your honesty in this.

I'm still learning, so hearing about the weaknesses in one's work is an important part of the process.

That's the way Acererak was set up in the D&D module. He hid deep inside the treasure-filled tomb in a place that was brutally difficult to find.
The size of the tomb came from adapting multiple-layered passageways into the Arcanum enviroment.
I did add the Orcs at the begining and end but otherwise it's fairly faithful to the module.
The Spider Cave was similarly adapted from another module.

I believe I shall be less literal in adapting those in the future.

Edit: Sorry my responses are so short, but I'm about to fall asleep.
'Night.

 

Ah, D&D explains it, gotcha, well D&D is for people whose minds are creative enough to fill in the blanks and hardcore rpgers... Arcanum was built all smarted up for the player on its own.

BTW, I just got a mechanical arachnid(poison) from a mol hander. I was on the way to Tarrant from stillwater to get HT Parnell's pelt. In talking with him, my party list suddered as if I'd picked up a new follower. When I checked it, my new green friend, the mechanical arachnid, was now (Fire) instead of (Poison). Odd, it still does poison damage though.

 

Now that I'm awake again:

The idea of a small party being holed up inside the tomb had occured to me, but I'd rejected it in favor of the over-eager first-timer and the dual mystery of his demise. *Makes note to re-examine the concept*

In a roundabout way you mention Acererak not using spells. Well, I just checked him with WorldEd and sure enough his spell list got cleared.
He was set to use Harm, Entangle, Disperse Magic, Stun, and Poison Vapors; with Only Cast Highest (spell) checked. Item 110 on the glitch list.

As for Lynchbany: It is going to be converted into a proper side-quest before too much longer, and I'm looking for a way to free Bany but so far nothing I've come up with sounds good enough to act on.

Now that it's been pointed out to me, I think I am still in the experiment mode. I need to watch that.

The reason that the tomb, the Spider Cave, and even Lynchbany didn't get a townmap is because there is a limit of 161 townmaps that can be made. Between Troika, the Cargo Hold, and myself, all but twelve have been used. Those I'm hanging onto for the larger towns, Dwarrowdelf (Moria), and the large area campaigns*. Otherwise, yes, the dungeons would have been built like you said.

BTW: The is only one more big dungeon to be built - and that's Dwarrowdelf. It just has to a big one to go all the way through the Grey Mountains and be at least somewhat faithful to it's legend.
(And I found a tolerable stand-in for the Balrog!)

*The biggest one needs a total of ten outside areas. By listing and making the townmap to include all of those, the player will have a faster way to go from one cleared location to another without getting lost. Kind of like Kree.

I did that in the Spider Cave, but, appearently, not well enough. At the exit for each level was one who was considerably stronger than the others.
*Another note*

That is odd.
Did the arachnid change from green-banded to red-banded, or did it just get a name change?

 

OMG, I WANT TO PLAY THIS SO BAD!!! Curse you, unworking mod on my computer!

 

I'll ask again -

 

just a name change. it repeated with another one I got from another mol hander. I do not know if this is specific to them being loot, as I cannot make that specific arachnid with my idiot savant. I have discovered that Idiot Savants only get a benefit of 1 per tech book, instead of 20 @ 100% TA. Me head hurt affer me read book. Also, apparently, idiot savants cannot complete the gods quest, since the high priestess Bridgette will not talk to idiots, thus no quest to restore the idol to the altar.

Also, discovered that the Machined Plate hack isn't working. I added line 385 to effect.mes and edited the 303030Ma... whatever scr that goes with it to point it to 385 and dumped the effects.mes and the *.scr into the appropriate folders. Works for me now, but might consider adding it to next version. Machined plate is key to professor type players who need the extra str to lug around extra traps and ammo without blowing extra points on str when there is good tech to do the job for you. Ok, now I done ticked off the dwarves... "Any work not done with your hands is no such thing" but not all techies are dwarves.

 

Tekkus: As you play, watch the names of items and NPCs for unusual listings. ie: A chest named King.
I encountered this glitch a while back and needed a complete reinstall to get rid of it.

Thanks for letting me know about the Machined Plate. I've got it updated now. I'm pretty sure the Backgrounds Hack had messed it up.

 

I don't think so, considering I didn't use my play disk at all. And that I didn't download it from a website. I downloaded it from a friend.

 

Spiffy: It was a thought.

Tekkus: A little something I neglected to ask about. When you did the Spider Cave, did you (or anyone else!) figure out why I put so many Kadura Stems outside? There is about 3x more Kadura than Ginka Roots....

Spoiler

Each large spider has an capsule of venom.

 

I figured it was something like that, but looting the corpses of non humans is something I'm not accustomed to doing.

 

I thought it made for a nice twist and helped get the player through the scene.

Besides, this was something I always wished Troika or even ChrisBeddoes had thought of.

 

Okay, so while screwing around, I discovered something: some things work, and others don't. I have the new backgrounds, portraits, and loading screen - but I can't find the chest at the begining, the Shrouded Hills temple is still a dark place filled with rats, ect.

Any idea what's going on?