openboe/oboe
2
0
Fork 0
Code Issues 146 Pull Requests 4 Actions Packages Projects Releases Wiki Activity

Uploaded the rest of the original Mac documentation. It still needs major cleanup though.

Browse Source 
git-svn-id: http://openexile.googlecode.com/svn/trunk@106 4ebdad44-0ea0-11de-aab3-ff745001d230
This commit is contained in:
Celtic Minstrel
2009-07-10 18:10:51 +00:00
parent 9ed48e4be1
commit 6e2123b24a
37 changed files with 3168 additions and 56 deletions
Download Patch File Download Diff File Expand all files Collapse all files

49
doc/editor/About.html Normal file
View File

@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css">
<title></title>
<meta name="Generator" content="Cocoa HTML Writer">
<meta name="CocoaVersion" content="949.46">
<style type="text/css">
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Helvetica}
p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Helvetica; min-height: 12.0px}
p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Helvetica}
span.Apple-tab-span {white-space:pre}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<p class="p1"><b>Section 1: About the Blades of Exile Scenario Editor</b></p>
<p class="p2"><br></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>OK. Youve played Blades of Exile (and maybe other Exile games), and you have your own ideas for adventures. Youd like to come up with your own twisted ideas, and inflict them upon the general public. Well, now you can! Blades of Exile comes with a powerful elaborate scenario design kit.</p>
<p class="p3"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>How powerful? Well, the three scenarios that came with Blades of Exile were created using the scenario editor and only the scenario editor. It can create fully detailed adventures, including weird special encounters, people to talk to, and a world that changes as time goes by.</p>
<p class="p3"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>There are other great things. You can also include customized graphics. You can distribute scenarios you make over the Internet, so that all sorts of people can play them. Scenarios you make on a Macintosh will work on a PC running Windows, and vise versa. And, best of all, you can make basic scenarios with very little work. If you dont want to learn all the complicated nitty gritty, you dont have to!</p>
<p class="p2"><br></p>
<p class="p3"><b>How to Get Started</b></p>
<p class="p2"><br></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>If you want to make scenarios, the first thing to do is play Blades of Exile. A lot. Much of what follows wont be the least bit clear if you arent familiar with how the game works.</p>
<p class="p3"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>When youre familiar with what Blades of Exile is like, read the next chapter. It gives a detailed, step by step description of how to make a scenario, make a new town, and populate it with monsters and treasure. It will tell you all you need to know to make a basic, fun scenario with lots of chopping and hacking.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Once you have the basics down, the other chapters in this section go into a bit more detail on scenario basics. You will learn how to make multiple towns, create wandering encounters, and do other, more elaborate things.</p>
<p class="p3"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Finally, when you have a grasp of all the basics, if you are strong of heart you can move on to the next section: Advanced Scenario Design. There you will learn how to make special encounters and write dialogue, the heart of any truly good scenario.</p>
<p class="p2"><br></p>
<p class="p3"><b>Using the Instructions</b></p>
<p class="p2"><br></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Unfortunately, while you can play all the way through Blades of Exile without ever cracking open the documentation, the Scenario Editor is very different. Scenario design is a tricky business, and printing out the documentation and keeping it handy is strongly recommended. Alternately, you can get editor documentation (in loose-leaf form) from Spiderweb Software, Inc. Call us at (206) 789-4438.</p>
<p class="p3"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>In this section, you will often see (Advanced). This indicates something related to the advanced stuff described in the next section. Feel free to ignore these things for now.</p>
<p class="p2"><br></p>
<p class="p3"><b>The Basic Basics</b></p>
<p class="p2"><br></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Any Blades of Exile scenario is divided into two parts: the outdoors and the towns (and dungeons - theres no difference). The outdoors is a rectangle of sections, each 48 x 48 spaces (for example, Valley of Dying Things is 4 sections wide and 3 sections high, each section a 48 x 48 grid of spots of terrain). You can have up to 100 outdoor sections (although 10-20 is usually plenty).</p>
<p class="p3"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Towns have 3 sizes: 32 x 32, 48 x 48, and 64 x 64. You can have at most 200 towns (although 20-22 is already quite a few).</p>
<p class="p3"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>When a player starts your scenario, his or her party will start in one of your towns. From there he or she can leave the town to explore the outdoors. To design a scenario, you will edit towns and outdoor sections, and them make town entrances in the outdoors and link them with towns (this isnt hard, and is well explained in the next section). Populate the towns with critters, traps and puzzles, and you have a scenario!</p>
<p class="p2"><br></p>
<p class="p3"><b>Three Final Warnings:</b></p>
<p class="p2"><br></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Good scenario design is a time consuming thing. Each of the Blades of Exile scenarios involved a month of full-time work. Start small at first, such as with a small outdoors and 4 or 5 towns. Put the massive Exile-sized epic off for a little while, or you risk putting a month of work into a scenario you will never finish, and which nobody will ever see. There is little more satisfying than getting an E-mail saying how much fun someone had playing your scenario. Alas, you never get such an E-mail until your scenario is done.</p>
<p class="p3"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Also, ALWAYS test your scenarios. Debugging is critically important. Play through them yourself, and, if possible, get someone else to play them too. If you design a scenario which cant be finished because of a bug, nobody will appreciate it.</p>
<p class="p3"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Finally, back up your scenario file. Frequently. The designer of Blades of Exile does it hourly. <span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span>Put a copy on a floppy, and hide the floppy in your car. Copy it onto a friends computer. Put a copy in your safety deposit box. Remember, one hard drive crash can wipe out a month (or more) of work in a moment.</p>
<p class="p2"><br></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>But enough preamble ... lets make a scenario!</p>
</body>
</html>