Exult Forum

The new notebook (N) is an interesting addition to Exult. Though it would be handy if your notebook automatically skipped ahead to the next page while typing.

Keep up the good work.

It's still in early development, and there's lots of fiddling I have to do to get the display and cursor to work right.

a little suggestion that popped to my mind is that that book could be used for automatically write down important events. Could be done when flags get set, only problem is that "flag nn got set" is not really helpful. But at least the met flag could be noted and the location of the NPC.

if it wasn't for gruck pointing it out, I would not have paid attention to this new feature! I've tried it and DrCode is right, there are some pointer/page bugs still in the code. It is however massively impressive!

Good work!

Maybe an update on the front page might be useful?

Artaxerxes

Dominus: That would be cool. I guess it's something we'd need to do by hand, where we'd have a facility to specify "When flag 391 is set, add a note with text-message 47."

I've been checking the changelog once a week for about the past 4 years or so. Exult is just such a cool project But a frontpage update is definately in order.

Dominus: That would be cool. I guess it's something we'd need to do by hand, where we'd have a facility to specify "When flag 391 is set, add a note with text-message 47."

I hope you're adding some kind of usecode intrinsic for this too. It would be nice to be able to do the same thing for new games.

The text file it's defined in could be patched/provided by the game.

i like this idea.

I finally got around to implementing Dominus' idea of automatically adding text when a global flag is set (indicating that an important event took place). It works by using a file, "autonotes.txt", that's in the "static" directory, and which has each note on a single line, with "#" indicating comments. (I'll try to add a method for storing multiple lines for a flag pretty soon.) An example for BG would be:

# Flag 0x3c is set when you find the body/key in the stables:
0x3c:What's this? A body! And a key? Could this be a clue?:-)

Maybe it could be a community project to figure out the important flags and create files for BG and SI. If Exult is compiled with "DEBUG", it will print a message on the console when a global flag is set.

Another thing that would be nice - ESPECIALLY with autonotes - would be the ability to skip to the last page of the notebook by pressing, say, Ctrl+End or somesuch. As it is, the player would get really bored holding the Page Down key after a couple dozen flags have been set... or the player has written a couple dozen entries of his own, or both together. Before Gorlab Swamp in SI, my notebook was so large that I prefer to have a text editor open in the background to edit it there...

I'm not sure automatically setting them for certain flags will always have good results. Sometimes multiple flags are needed to trigger a certain conversation option, and sometimes flags are mutually exclusive. What about events that clear a flag?
Anyway, I think I've got half of the SI flags described. I'll post the list somewhere when I get a chance to clean up the formatting.

I agree with SB-X, not every flag should be noted, but I think that should be directed by autonotes.txt. If we don't want a flag to be noted it just shouldn't be written there and therefore ignored...
I'm counting on you, SB-X, for giving us the flags

I didn't even notice this feature until this thread. I think it's a superb idea. Maybe there could be 2 sections of this book: one a journal that records every event (as dicussed above) and the other for the player's own personal notes. I know games like Neverwinter Nights do something similar to this.

As for getting through the book more quickly, I'm thinking of adding a slider at the bottom (the one used for choosing numbers).

Now imagine being able to create/remove/change tabs so the information can be ordered.

You would add a tab and call it, say, "Trinsic", or "Active quests", or "Contacts" and put relevant information in there. Even the data could be stored easily using the .ini syntax as in:

[Trinsic]
blablabla

[Active Quests]
blablabla

[Contacts]
blablabla


That could work nice. Then flipping through the notebook is a matter of clicking on the right tab.

Artaxerxes

That's a good idea

I also like the 'tabs' idea. I'm wondering if it would be okay to have a limited number, say 8-10, of them. It's true that most GUI notebooks have an unlimited number of tabs with scroll arrows at each end. But I'd like to keep U7's notebook looking like a physical book (so when you go to a particular page, the tabs above it should move to the left side).

I'd say make the number a fixed number and a fixed width. It's up to us to figure out names that will fit on the tab, just like we would do in real life!

Artaxerxes

Just revisiting this thread because a spammer needed to add his comment... But I totally forgot about the notebooks autonotes functionality... I wonder if that still works
And if anyone has a good list for including such a file


Edit: yeah, still works... anyone got a nicely cleaned up file list of events?

Yup, still seems to work just fine. It's be cool if the notebook could be divided into cities. Then, as the Avatar was given a quest, it could appear in black, and when the quest was completed, it'd turn to red, or be crossed out. Wouldn't be too many pages of notes I imagine, and the notebook could remember the most recent page you looked at. It'd be fun to write messages.

See, and it doesn't work for me. I'm running the latest 1.4.x snapshot. Hitting 'N' brings up the notebook, and I can type, but the text never wraps, and once it hits the middle of the pages it starts just typing blank spaces. I don't see any journal entries, either.

I tested this in both TBG and SI, both with and without the major mods (Keyring and SI Fixes).

Hitting 'N' brings up the notebook, and I can type, but the text never wraps, and once it hits the middle of the pages it starts just typing blank spaces.

Text wraps fine for me, it only doesn't when the length of a word is too long to ever wrap in a line. So with normal written text it will work fine, but if you keep on writing without spaces it won't work. Words like "Donaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft" (the official longest German word) will not work but "I met Iolo and Petre, they told me about a gruesome murder" will work fine.

I don't see any journal entries, either.

That what this thread is about, right now you still need to write yourself in the journal, no automatic entries yet. If anyone provides a nice list of game flags and some short entries we could have those...

Wow.. I realize this thread is 5 years old now but all this time I never even knew there was a notebook in Exult!!

That wouldve been handy cause last games I started I tried to go through just on my own without using the internet or anything (Although I ended up resorting to the Origin Serpent Isle cluebook eventually).. Wasted a whole legal pad writing down notes and whatnot fpr 7 and 7 pt 2!


Even more reason to start it all over again!!

The notebook isn't a very well pushed feature of Exult... Especially since it only came to life in the snapshots after the last release...

It's been said before, and I'll say it again: perhaps it's time to make 1.4.x the official stable release (it's been years, after all...).

Dominus wrote:
>
"Donaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft" (the official longest German word)

Whoa, Dominus, you have no idea the depth of the Wiki trail that word led me on!

obligatory http://xkcd.com/214/

Artaxerxes

he he

I've compiled some stuff for autnotes for BG at http://pastebin.com/Se1G0dn7
put that in a text file and save it as autonotes.txt in your BG static folder and see wether it works. I didn't have time to test it out myself yet

I've put the autonotes.txt files in each games data dir in the source. You still have to copy them to the static folder of the games. I wrote some witty notes for BG but for SI it is mostly the flag description...

Read your autonotes. Made a few spelling corrections. Enjoy.

where?

Weird, I made some changes, I hit submit, it showed everything changed. Now when I go back to the page, its all changed back to what it was before.

No, tried again. It keeps deleting my changes after I make them. No idea why.

On the pastebin?
When you do make changes you actually make a new pastebin entry which has another url. You should have then in your browser history.

Oh, OK. I've got the whole thing sorted out now. I'm kind of slow on this kind of thing. http://pastebin.com/nxmH5KH3

Thanks, since the version in SVN is a bit different I'll take a closer look in a few days.
BUT Ricky is actually wrong, the little baby is called Riky


EDIT: I had to freeze the thread unfortunately. Spammers liked this thread too much and always targeted it

Edit: unfroze thread again.

Still need to get Grucks changes in. Sorry got side tracked for quite some time (edit: added most of his improvements)

BUT I changed Exult so you can toggle autonotes in the misc options *AND* that the autonotes are bundled with Exult, so you no longer need to place them in the static folder.
Will have to add documentation today or tomorrow.