Looking for Planescape: Torment testers

[Chilvence]

I'm sure its probably something simple like that, going by the track record.

 

I actually started looking at the spells properly for the first time (ie looking at the data, not just testing in game), there is all sorts of weird stuff going on. Even the simple 1st level spell 'Shield' doesn't seem to have an AC mod effect that I can find, it is just 2 animations and a sound...

 

I only got so far into doing that when I couldn't help thinking 'should i just override some of this crap with stuff that actually works in the other games, so at least there is something rather than nothing?'. Would that be something helpful?

 

I mean pragmatically, I just want to be able to play the game, I am much less interested in what weird stuff Black Isle were smoking at the time they made it. Much as it would be nice to have a 99% accurate recreation of the original game, it would also be nice to have something relatively functional in the meantime, even if it would ultimately be destined for the chopping block...

 

Plus there is that voice in the back of my mind that says 'making PST behave like the other games could only be an improvement'... I mean I love Torment the game, but I also hate parts of it... I was never a fan of the whole 'cast a spell, wait five minutes for it to play out on the screen before you can do anything else' way of RPG making. That's the beauty of BG/IWD, you can stop at any time, but you can still have fast paced carnage if you can choreograph it well enough. Torment doesn't have that, it just somehow makes the up for the absence of it in other ways. I think at the time they probably just lacked confidence in how well the realtime w/ pause system was going to work, so didn't run with it.

[lynx]

re shield: the actual bonus is applied internally, check out its second opcode. It's a hodgepodge of everything. Many spells use that and then some are reliant on custom projectiles, so it's harder to look at these vs for example bg1 ones.

[Ishad Nha]

Can't use items, the radial menu is brought up okay. I press the Select Item and an item is highlighted okay. But if I am trying to use Bandages, I can't create the healing cursor by pressing Enter (or any other key for that matter).

 

I tried hot keys to get around the problem but again no luck.

On original PS:T items can be used quite normally.

I am on Windows 10, is that problem?

Edited September 30, 2015 by Ishad Nha

[Chilvence]

Actually on my own personal setup i have modded the menu, I uncovered several problems myself. One of the things is that some targeting modes arent set until you hide the menu again, which is awkward to say the least. But my code is too messy at the moment to submit, and I havent really fixed it properly yet.

[Ishad Nha]

Here is the procedure:

• Right-click to bring up the radial menu
• Choose Select Item
• Left-click on a useful item
• Right click anywhere to hide the radial menu.

 

Then the appropriate cursor shows!

An item must be in an Item Quick Slot before it can be used in this way.

Edited October 1, 2015 by Ishad Nha

[lynx]

yes, I don't see any bug there.

 

note to self: cutscene/parser bug (save on previous page), store trigger issues

[Chilvence]

It's just a little nuisance regarding the float menu, because you have to hide it again to get the action you want, which also means constantly pausing and unpausing the game, and also not being able to assign actions to your party members while paused.

 

I generally hated that thing in the original though, so meh...

[lynx]

i managed to fix this cutscene issue, but it touches something very basic and crucial, so I'm not sure if it should go in at this time. Maybe I'll ifdef it for pst later, it could hardly be a more invasive change.

[Chilvence]

Is it because of divergence between branches of the infinity engine? I'm actually pretty curious now, I love a mystery....

 

I've actually been twiddling my thumbs again last few days - I can't find any more actual 'bugs' worth speaking of, only those which are just missing features, which I know will come in due course. The lack of new bugs is a positive sign, I just wish I had more ability to actually help with the missing stuff...

 

Maybe instead of recruiting Torment testers, scouting for some more programmers would be helpful

[tormentor]

I'm actually quite used to game programming but the trouble with gemrb is all the obscure data formats and needing to know how the infinity engine does all its things. It's quite a task to even familiarise yourself with the codebase. I also have no idea about things like openal etc.

 

I come more from the gamecode side of things than the engine side.

 

Plus I have another game to work on. I can report bugs and do android builds etc and maybe hack a little here and there but can't join full-time unfortunately.

[SyntaxError]

The type of programmers we need most would need to know next to nothing about IE itself. What we need is somebody that can build a nice configuration interface for android and somebody that can finish the OpenGL driver... Changes in my dev branch have completely broken the OpenGL driver and I lack the know how to fix it and we have no active dev that does. Upgrading the SDL audio driver would also be welcome and requires no knowledge of IE.

 

lynx and fizzle generally has a good handle on all the game scripting and spell issues

[lynx]

chiv: cool! You can improve some of your staging stuff, let me know if you need any input. Eg., is the csound.2da one done? I'm done with iwd2 for this cycle, so I have plenty to catch up to, thanks to you guys.

 

The problem boiled down to ClearActions demonstrably clearing only part of the action queue. I doubt the new way of things could hurt other uses in pst, but for the other engines, it is less clear and depends on use. Everyone believes it clears the whole queue in bg2 ...

 

I think this cycle has had enough radical changes and will need extra testing anyway. I wanted to do a new release in a month or so, but SyntaxError still hasn't found time for the text regressions, so we'll see.

 

tormentor: that's appreciated! What you need to know depends on what you want to fix and yes, it can be daunting. We don't have the luxury of being a library you can extensively write tests for and the fact that it's a reverse-engineering effort also hampers us at times. But we're getting sooo close.

[SyntaxError]

 

 

SyntaxError still hasn't found time for the text regressions, so we'll see.

 

The text editing stuff proved too hacky and complex without my view hierarchy implementation so that wont be back until then (currently held back by needing to update the SDL2 driver). I want to find time this weekend to look at the SetVarAssoc bug with the TextAreas and even the PST map notes, but i cant make sense of your comment about that.

 

I also notice you mention that PST animates dialog transitions. this should be trivial to accomplish since I added the duration parameter to TextArea::ScrollToY. in fact, we already do this for the feedback messages appended in BG2. looking at the code you would just have to make sure that the PST message TA has the IE_GUI_TEXTAREA_AUTOSCROLL flag set and then change/ifdef this:

flags&IE_GUI_TEXTAREA_AUTOSCROLL && !selectOptions 

so it only checks the flag and doesnt care about selectOptions. you probably would need to do some calculation for the duration, but we already do that for chapter text (GemRB_TextArea_SetChapterText)

 

a problem with that might be that this would also cause the responses to be animated... if thats a problem then it could possibly be more easily addressed once the view hierarchy changes are in so that we can just keep the text and the options separate.

Edited October 7, 2015 by SyntaxError

[lynx]

The feature notes are less important, they're just there since there's no designated place. Pst animated everything, so it will be easier. It also used the Read more button a lot, but we can do without.

 

If you want to see what's wrong with map notes, just revert the first chunk of 2c2f77e8f89 (happy accident). None will be displayed anymore, while they're supposed to be on the textedit used for their editing (the diff just made it display them instead of the map name).

 

By SDL2 you mean the normal driver or the gl ones?

 

Contingency bindings work now, thanks.

[SyntaxError]

 

 

By SDL2 you mean the normal driver or the gl ones?

 

The non-opengl one; i havent a clue how to fix the opengl one...