Viridian Games Forums

Dunno if this is new, found an inventory exploit when starting new games:

Buy some potions
Go to the underwater cave.
Get killed
Go to main menu
Hit new game
All potions from last game are still there

This seems to only happen with MP and HP potions, armor and weapons disappear.

Found another bug while fighting the slornite thieves.

Pick smite from the abilities menu, click inventory - game interprets this as an attack turn and you get attacked. Same happens if you try to click on anything in your inventory until smite is dismissed with a right click.

"Pick smite from the abilities menu, click inventory - game interprets this as an attack turn and you get attacked. Same happens if you try to click on anything in your inventory until smite is dismissed with a right click."

For me, if I click on the interface with Smite active while standing next to an enemy, the game crashes. (On Windows 7, "Inaria.exe has stopped working.") The skipping-turn problem was in the last version, but it never crashed.

Otherwise, Smite and Cleave do seem to work now.

Hey Viridian, where do you GET these guys? They're fast, honest, thorough, and descriptive. Everything beta testers should be, but never are. Hey guys? You rock.

In Beta6, it takes /forever/ to start up on my Netbook. It looks like it's not responding, and is tempting to close the app.

Is there any way you can throw up a splash screen and keep the Windows message pump going so: 1) people know to just be freakin' patient? 2) Windows won't think 'doing stuff' means 'unresponsive'?

* Slornite army routinely whups the crap out of the Last Front folks now. When everyone's dead they just chill there and have a picnic and tea, 'coz they just overran Inaria and they can relax after a job well done.

Oh, heck - the smite thing was mentioned earlier and I completely forgot about it. It'll be an easy fix, though.

Grah...Henry, it's annoying that you found an exploit (I thought I'd been SO CAREFUL) but I'm not surprised. Putting in the "go back to the title screen" thing was a serious program flow change.

cfx: The longer startup is because it's preloading the music (to fix the crackle). It only added a few seconds to mine...would you mind timing it, and telling me exactly how long it takes? On a completely unrelated note, GOD DO I HATE SDL_MIXER.

cfx: I don't know, man. I built it and they came. I honestly wish their talents were being put to use on a much better game.

Load time: 28 seconds, with no visible disk activity (harddisk light doesn't show up).

Plenty of time for Windows (and the user) to think something's wrong.

Okay, I've found a solution for the music crackle that doesn't involve preloading the music. cfx, would you be willing to test a new .exe for me?

In other news, both of the other bugs (smite and potions) were one-line fixes.

Absolutely.

Okay, you can get the new exe here: http://www.viridiangames.com/bin/Inaria.exe

Just drop it in and replace the old one.

gameplay-balance? bug? long/short range attacks by foes missed me (at a certain level) nearly all the time.
I think it has something to do with the armor. When equipped (no extrapoints for dextery whatsoever) successful attacks are more improbable to happen. The stronger the armor, the more the missed/hit ratio. Maybe the program goes: If the armor is too strong, the attackpoints don't count, so it is called 'missed you' instead of 'hits you for 0'. anyone noticed something similar?

foe still shoots arrows, even if he is just one field away. (and I can do it do, which makes the whole scene a bit strange.
possible solution: automatically switch to short range attack, if entity is just one field away + short range weapon is available.

Yeah, if the attack against you is reduced to 0 by your armor, it's counted as a miss.

Switching attacks...probably isn't going to happen in this version. There's always Inaria II :)

Overall, how is the balance now? Too hard, too easy? Getting about 2 points of armor makes the first dungeon a cakewalk...but that IS the first dungeon.

Found another possible reason: If I save at an advanced level and start a new game from the main menu, all the abilities stay.
Can't say much about the balance at this moment. But I think it is not bad, if you make the game a little "too hard". More saving slots would be nice (Inaria 2.0?)

Bugs, new and remaining:

If you close the game (it works right if you reload or even main menu -> continue), the mother dragon forgets about the way you butchered her whelp.

Whether you learn the dragon's secret or not, The Evil One assumes you did (I realize he's not finished).

Enemies still can't find you if you shoot/Smite them while they are in one of the four absolute corners of the game screen.

Sometimes Slorn Thieves and Mages just let me beat them to death without fighting back when I engage in melee range.

Teleport traps work, but none of the others seem to work. Sleep traps worked in the past, but I didn't find any. Poison traps poison, but poison doesn't do anything as far as I can tell.

You can't Smite a non-hostile NPC that you could otherwise attack (Firebird, dragons) until it becomes hostile.

Those same Firebirds and dragons become non-hostile if you save and load. Not a big deal, just saying.

Balance:

At 8+ armor you are at least very close to invincible. At 16, I don't think you can get hurt.

It seems like enemies never get stronger (besides Health) after the Mountain Trial. The difficulty is good there, but if you leave around level 5 with 4+ armor and more than 2 dexterity like I did in my first game, you will not get hurt very often. I forgot that Slorn arrows and fireballs could hit for a while.

I never used Enchant Weapon. It may fix itself and become useful if later enemies are made more dangerous (In the Mountain Trial, Enchant Armor is a better bet).

Silly:

I beat the game at level 3 in just under 10 minutes. I thought this was bad, then I realized I saw a 5-minute speedrun of Morrowind, among other games (I'm too used to JRPGs, I guess). Also, I don't exactly see someone doing this on their first play.

With bug abuse, my best time is 2:15 at level 1.

@Viridian

Looks good! Load time is appropriate (much faster, and Windows doesn't think the app is unresponsive) -- and best of all, I haven't been able to reproduce buffer issues.

What was the magic? (I'd be happy with an API doc reference and a flag list.)

Confirming inventory exploit and smite/ui bug is gone.

Slornites in the underground cave still destroying me every time I go down there... Am I missing something? I've got armor, a knife, and as many potions as I can afford (yes, I equipped the armor and dagger!)

Edit: Ok, been playing like a caster, but it seems like smite is actually pretty useless at first and you need to go hand to hand. It might be better to NOT start with any spells since they seem to be a bit useless at the start?

cfx: Fixed the problem by not using SDL_Mixer's automatic loop system. Instead, I wait for a piece of music to finish, then simply replay that music again. I discovered that a large buffer causes a pause between the end and start of the loop, so I actually lowered the buffer size to eliminate it. This will require the program to do a little more work, but the results seem to be good. And my research indicates this is a standard workaround for this bug. Glad it seemed to work.

HenryK: Yeah, you can't really play a caster until you get your INT and WIL up pretty good. But because there are shootable switches, I want the player to always have a missile attack of some kind.

As much as I don't want to do it, I think I'm going to have to allow you guys to create your own characters :) I'll probably give you 1 in each stat and 5 extra points to distribute the way you wish. That would probably solve about everything.

Seems like armor has actually unbalanced the game. I did a lot of work on the balance before I figured out armor wasn't working. I think I'll make it so that instead of stopping straight damage (2 points of armor = -2 to damage) I'll make it so that armor MAY stop that much damage (2 points of armor = chance to stop up to 2 damage). That way, the more armor you have, the better your chances of stopping damage will be, but enemies can still get lucky and hit you - even level 1 ones.

I also need to construct my enemies better, obviously. Even at high levels, their points aren't getting allocated in such a way as to make them dangerous enemies.

Weapons might also be too good, as they multiply the amount of damage you do. Perhaps they would be better as straight damage adds (besides, that's classic :) Enchant weapon might become more useful if you come up against an enemy that you have to kill but you can't seem to get past his high DEX or armor.

A bit of "back to the drawing board" here, which is disappointing.

Well, if it makes you feel any better, I really like those ideas.

Maybe naming it "smite" is the problem. If it was something like "tickle", I wouldn't be inclined to use it in combat.

+1.

No wait. MORE inclined to use it. Bestows insanity upon your victims.