[spoiler]Re bozbar: I thought I’d removed all of the INSTEAD rules for that exact reason. Oops.
Re archivist: what happens if you try to talk to him? The intended behavior is that he just mutters about things and ignores you, but there are some small hints in his comments.
Re tunnel: was this immediately after opening the door in the Closet? There’s another puzzle to open the other end, though I’ll hint it better.
Re krebf: there are a lot of those, but hopefully they won’t slow down the game. I implemented them for the sequel and didn’t want to break things by removing them.
Re the dome: definitely a bug.
Re the knife: can you refer to it as “the Adventurer’s knife”? If not then I probably broke the ownership relation again. -_-
Re all of these: anyone who points out a bug which is then fixed gets their name hidden in the game somewhere. Would you like to be credited “Merlin Fisher” or something else? (You can send a PM if you don’t want it publicly known.
And which syntax did you find frustrating/are there alternative phrasings that would have been more intuitive? I’m trying to avoid guess-the-verb if at all possible, with direct hints in the game if necessary (e.g. for AIM THE PALANTIR SOUTHEAST).[/spoiler]
I’m curious as well. Also: at what point did it start to slow down? Were any particular actions very slow?
Things began to get very slow around the time I was
[spoiler]instructing the serage-controlled adventurer to do stuff, and got very slow after I pulled some junk from the junk pile in the storage room. If there are every-turn rules affecting the inventory or all items currently “on stage”, that might explain the latter problem.
oh, and one other bug I forgot to mention: if you get the purple tome out of the checkout room in act 1, the tome teleports back into the checkout room when act 2 starts, even if you were carrying it.[/spoiler]
have not tried Git. I had some difficulty digging up current interpreters; can you furnish me with a good download link?
Git isn’t easy to find, but it’s available here. It tends to be much faster than Glulxe.
I’ll look into the slowdown and see if I can reproduce it. I think there may be a badly-phrased “if the player is carrying a…” check somewhere that does an expensive check for every inventory object.
I wonder whether Glulxe and Git savegames are interchangeable. They should be, right? That’ll make it easier to see whether the interpreter change did make a difference!
Turns out that makes it impossible to progress, but it took me a while to examine everything else and figure out that I was actually stuck. After restarting, REZROV DOOR did the trick. But, you might want to add that synonym…[/spoiler]
Out of curiosity, will the next patch fix what you see as all the issues? D’you have a list of known issues/enhancements that you’re going through? Do you foresee reaching the end of this list and releasing a version that you feel is final (bar any totally unexpected bug reports which can happen any time)?
Logic dictates that at some point you’ll run out of bug fixes and enhancements, but what does logic know, heh?
@Peter Given the complexity of this game, I would be shocked if it were ever bug free, even with a team of testers and programmers. When I worked in the video game industry, it wasn’t “When will all the bugs be gone?” but “When will the game be playable enough that people won’t hate us?”, because bugs never stop popping up. Draconis is only different from other authors in that they choose to acknowledge it and try to fix it.
Thanks for the chastisement. I was asking Draconis because I am interested in the development of the game, admire his willingness to keep correcting it, and because if another patch is imminent I’ll hold off playing it until then because I want to make sure to play the best version of the game I possibly can.
At the moment I have only the one outstanding bug and one enhancement, which I’m hoping to finish by the weekend. The next (unreleased) sections are still horribly bug-riddled but my goal is to release at least a bit more of the story by the start of June.
Correction: which I’m hoping to finish by about two days after I figure out why this compiles on Windows but not Ubuntu. I am finally realizing why all the links between the extension folders were a bad idea…
For what it’s worth, I was only using it as a shortcut for REZROV NORTH DOOR (to disambiguate it from the south door); I don’t think I would have thought about using spells on compass directions in general. But it’s probably a good idea in general to be robust about players using directions as nouns.
In the current version it will redirect to a door if possible, and otherwise give the “not substantial” message (same as if you REZROV MOONLIGHT or such).
For some reason, this post prompted me to start Scroll Thief, which I now just finished (albeit not with a perfect score). While I still encountered some bugginess and slowness here and there, it was a truly impressive game. I was puzzled not to see more IF from @Draconis on IFDB. Is this really your only game? If so (well, in any case actually) I’m definitely looking forward to the sequel!
It is indeed my only game; real life’s gotten in the way of making more IF. But if you find any new bugs, let me know and I’ll try to fix them, and the sequel is still on the back burner for whenever I get more time!
What do you want to ask the 1) astronomer about: the 2) carbide lantern in the Splendid Cavern, or the 3) dented brass lantern?
What do you want the 1) Adventurer in the Bottom of the Staircase to point: the 2) small transparent sphere, the 3) small blue sphere, or the 4) small red sphere?
What do you want to put the 1) rusty knife in: the 2) battered scroll tube, the 3) glass aquarium, the 4) ornate mahogany box, the 5) pen case, or the 6) small oven in the Clean Room?
