Grimrock

Grimrock 1.3.6 has reached public beta. It includes lots of awesome new stuff. Couple of juicy additions that we'll be using:
- odDrawGui() for handling events (priest that resurrects/heals party, beholder talk etc.) It's possible to get a dialogs with it!
- onEquipItem(), onUnequipItem() for cursed items (we probably don't want to reveal to players that an item is cursed and have negative parameters).
- Party:setPosition() for easy teleporting around (JKos will probably update his test code very soon)
- probably many other smaller additions

onEquipItem(), onUnequipItem() for cursed items

IIRC, the only "cursed" item in EOB1 was the "plate armor of beauty".. which could be removed and was actually better or equal than chain, so not actually cursed there were reasons for it to be used. Don't know if this was a bug in the original EOB though, but the fact that there were no spells to deal with cursed items, seems to tell that it was intentional (maybe dictated by release date, but still).

EOB2 was actually filled with cursed items, and had "True Seeing" and "Remove Curse" as spells to manage that.

Of course, all of this is in my memory and could be all wrong.

Edit: changed Tree Seeing in True Seeing, as trees were already quite visible my themselves, plus a hidden tree is not much of a danger unless you are a skier.

@Xanathar: that seems correct.

I was surprised when I was able to take off the plate armor of great beauty. There are some things that are unbalanced in EOB1. Ability to take off cursed items is one of them. Another is almost useless magic item identification. I'm not sure if it is possible earlier, but I've found the first orb for the oracle to identify my items on level 9 or 10. That late in the game I didn't care much - it was too late. I think it is possible to extend EOB1 a bit with mechanisms available in EOB2.

Of course some people with reject that idea, the same way as there are complaints about Wenly's notes. It think the proper way to go with this would be to have a dialog box at the beginning of this mod asking if you want a precise recreation or with some extra features. Extra features being things like Wenly's Notes, unremovable cursed items, some scrolls of identify added here and there, etc. With 1.3.6 released, such a question seems possible.

Xanathar wrote:

onEquipItem(), onUnequipItem() for cursed items

IIRC, the only "cursed" item in EOB1 was the "plate armor of beauty".. which could be removed and was actually better or equal than chain, so not actually cursed there were reasons for it to be used. Don't know if this was a bug in the original EOB though, but the fact that there were no spells to deal with cursed items, seems to tell that it was intentional (maybe dictated by release date, but still).

Me think there were a few more cursed items beside that obvious cursed plate. But right, EoB1 had no mechanic to deal with cursed gear beside it reducing a character's stats, beside the dwarf's cleric maybe. Also even when not identified it was possible to determined the effect of any item by simply equiping it and compare stats.

thomson wrote:Of course some people with reject that idea, the same way as there are complaints about Wenly's notes. It think the proper way to go with this would be to have a dialog box at the beginning of this mod asking if you want a precise recreation or with some extra features. Extra features being things like Wenly's Notes, unremovable cursed items, some scrolls of identify added here and there, etc. With 1.3.6 released, such a question seems possible.

Well i don't think that a precise recreation is possible since parts of the LoG game system are hardcoded and can't be modified to match the AD&D system EoB is based on. One can see those conflicts right away when looking at the magic systems. For example the level 1 spell Armor grants AD&D AC 6. Now the AD&D's Armor Class system conflicts with it's equivalent in LoG, the Protection stat: AD&D AC ranges from 10 (worst) to -10 (best). Now Protection in LoG starts at 0 (worst) and climbs as long as one finds the gear to improve it, i.e. putting on an entire suit of Plate Mail grants Protection 60.

The magic system faces even more odds. In AD&D a magic user's ability to cast a specific number of spells per level is determined by his level. Those limits can be seen right now in the mod's implemented spellbook. Once all spells were cast that magic user had to rest to regain his spells. Yet a magic user can of course learn more spells of a specific level than he is alllowed to cast. In the LoG system all you need to use spells is enough energy and the invested skill points.

There are some things that are unbalanced in EOB1.

Like, Kenku level experience ? Or the "Invulnerabili.." I meant "You wi..." ahem I meant "StoneSkin" spell ?

I also perfectly remember that in the original version I had on floppies, if you kept an armor in hand it would lower the AC as if it were a shield. With that, everyone was at -10 except the mage, guaranteed. Later on my floppies became unreadable, so I ahem, "found" a version on internet somewhere, but the armor in hand trick didn't work anymore. So either my memory fails me more than my floppies did, or there exist two versions for PC around. Probably my memory

I am very nearly certain one dagger turned out to be -1 when ported over to eob2. It's actually my most vivid memory of the game as I found it so funny because I had been using it so long.

Well i don't think that a precise recreation is possible since parts of the LoG game system are hardcoded

Probably most of the parts can be overridden enough to work.

Taking your example of AC for example we can:

• Set every monster and champ to have an accuracy of 237487236482364823648
• In every onHit handler check a number of separate tables containing THAC0, ACs, weapon bonus etc. and determine if it's an hit or not. If it's an hit, damage the character appropriately, using dice rolls

In this case the osyluth is in the details, and probably some hook is missing some vital parameter to implement or things like that, but in theory it's feasible. Given custom UI rendering it might even be possible to completely hide the grimrock armor value and just show the AC.

If noone is working on it yet, and noone is eager to, I can try to implement the AD&D rules with the exception of spells, which seem to be already being handled (plus they are a very big effort on themselves).
I won't promise any kind of success nor any deadline however

The magic system faces even more odds. In AD&D a magic user's ability to cast a specific number of spells per level is determined by his level. Those limits can be seen right now in the mod's implemented spellbook. Once all spells were cast that magic user had to rest to regain his spells. Yet a magic user can of course learn more spells of a specific level than he is allowed to cast. In the LoG system all you need to use spells is enough energy and the invested skill points.

This is totally doable, I just didn't remember that the spell system worked like that. It has been a while (many years) when I have played any AD&D games.
If someone could write a detailed description of how it should work, then I could try to implement it.

I found the EOB manual here...
http://www.freegameempire.com/games/Eye ... der/manual

excerpts:
Top row is the level of the spell...
e.g. Magic Missile is lvl 1, while fireball is lvl 3.
The remainder of the table refers to how many spells of each level a mage(or cleric) can 'learn' at his experience level... these are chosen from a spellbook prior to the Mage 'resting'. So a level 3 mage can learn 2 first and 1 second level spells when he rests.. he can then only cast these specific spells before he needs to rest again.

Hope that is clear enough and helpful.

I actually thought the wisdom bonus was for mages (not clerics), but that could be down to faulty memory.


I actually downloaded a dosbox version of EOB from DJ's website http://www.oldgames.sk and played the first couple of levels. Might be useful if you want to get a more hands-on feel for the game and the magic system.

Grimwold wrote:I found the EOB manual here...
http://www.freegameempire.com/games/Eye ... der/manual

Does anyone know if these are exact the same rules as AD&D rules? I bought recently AD&D handbook, but it's the latest edition (4.0). I'm sure that a game from 1990 used earlier rules (was it 2.0?), but perhaps not much have changed (I'm not sure).

Grimwold wrote: I actually downloaded a dosbox version of EOB from DJ's website http://www.oldgames.sk and played the first couple of levels. Might be useful if you want to get a more hands-on feel for the game and the magic system.

I've finished the whole game couple days ego. It was fun to play it. There are couple things that can be done to make it more useful for the modding/recreation purposes:

1. There's All Seeing Eye tool - a stand alone tool that you can run besides dosboxed EOB1 and it will draw auto-map for you. It is excellent for debugging maps, you can reveal whole map, teleport, etc.
2. You can hack EOB.EXE file to disable collisions, so you can walk through walls (just like F1 in grimrock editor). Very useful if you want to go to a specific spot to look at something.
3. There are savegames available for all levels. Again, useful for checking something out.

Obviously, all those ruin game experience, but are useful for testing.