dark underlord's Arcanum tutorial

Hi, I've been using the "Creating Your Own World For Arcanum" tutorial by "darkunderlord" to learn how to make mods for Arcanum. At one point I encountered something strange. In part 3, chapter 15 it says;

"with the ‘select’ tool, right click the chest. From the menu that pops up, choose ‘Remember for Substitute’ near the bottom. Then, right-click the Dwarven Smithy and choose ‘Set Substitute Inventory’. Now, save your map. Load Arcanum and try trading with the Smithy now. "

However, when I attempt to trade with the smithy, he has nothing to sell. If I go to the chest, open it and go back to the smithy, only now does he sell the same things that are in the chest. Does anyone know what I should do to fix this?

 

Welcome to the forum, The Pigeon!

I've been trying to mod for over a year now and I've never encountered a situation exactly like you described. However, a remote possibility has occured to me.

As you are making your mod, are you using a save to test your latest effort?
If so, go to the Sierra/Arcanum/modules/Arcanum/maps folder.
There you'll find 85 to 100 oddly-named file with no file extention.
Select and delete those. Don't worry, they get replaced each time you start the game.
These files are a kind of "inventory sheet" the game engine uses and deleting them forces a recount.

Now start your mod and see if that helped.

Beyond this, I'm at a loss.

 

Greetings

Well I tried what you said, but the strange problem still occured. Hm, very puzzling. The tutorial's being pretty much perfect, so I don't think its directions are wrong.

The only thing I can think of (although I don't know why it happens) is that after I've right clicked the chest and the shop keeper and done the required stuff (and made sure in the drop down menu that it IS the dwarf and the chest selected and not scenery) the editor doesn't highlight the save button (i.e. recognize anything's been changed).

Also, I don't know if this helps, but I'm using the 1070 version of world editor as recommended in the tutorial and I'm using windows XP. On a slightly related note, I did try to email dark underlord about it, but I got the "delivery notification failure" email.

On a completely unrelated note, why does it say I posted and 4:03 PM when i infact posted at 12:08 pm?

 

This I have run into. Just checking a scene like you've described more often than not doesn't make a change. So either click the OK button(s), or if that doesn't bring up the Save highlight, move something over one space, then back.

So far so good.

He's pretty much given up on his creation. At least he seems to have quit answering questions concerning it.

Go to your profile - the link is in the page header - and reset the time difference to correspond with where you live.

 

Awesome, I'll try out what you mentioned . I actually tried the tutorial around a year ago, but gave up when I hit a problem with the conversation section (and dark under lord didn't reply - that and I didn't notice the forums link at all). Ironically, I figured out the speech problem this time, but I've now got the problem with the shop keeper. Hopefully it'll all work out.

On a side note, it's a pity he's given up on the tutorial - he did a really masterful job on it. That map-making manual thing by the troika team is too daunting to go through; it's something I'd look at AFTER finishing the tutorial (which turned all that scary amount of info into neat and fun to do packages).
That's my opinion anyway.

 

Well I tried what you said (several times just to be sure), but I still get the problem with needing to click on the chest before the shop keeper sells what's in it. I cannot fathom what the problem is... What version of World Ed do you use? I'm thinking maybe this problem doesn't occur in the later version, but I have no idea as of the moment.

 

Same as you - 1.0.7.0 and I still have no idea why this is happening to you.

Here's a very long-shot idea:
1) Create a new inventory chest and see if that does the trick.
2) If not, create a new blacksmith and test.

 

Thanks, I'll try it out. I haven't tried those ideas yet. Sorry I haven't replied in so long, but house work and christmas have driven almost all thoughts of gaming from my mind.

 

One other thing I thought of - did you use an Arcane Chest for the inventory source?
If so, replace it with an empty chest. The Arcane Chests are buggy to work with.

 

It does say "Arcane Chest" under "Known" so I'll try something different and see what happens.

Update 1:
IT WORKS!!!! WEEEE!!!!! Thanks very much! I'm so glad this fixed the problem - if I hadn't been able to fix this bug I would have never been able to progress in learning how to make modules and would have been forced to give up the idea entirely (Definetly not something I wished to happen).

Update 2:
If possible, someone should modify the tutorial to mention this problem and the solution. It's the only English tutorial I know of on the net for Arcanum (Everything else is in German...), so it's pretty important newbies like me find out ahead of time about these kind of problems. Oh, and once again, thanks for you help!