The Blades of Exile editor is a very powerful tool. Unfortunately, however, it is not totally as advertised. Some of the features the editor claims it can achieve do not work, a fact that I’ve spent many fruitless and frustrating hours discovering. If you can get any of things listed below to work, or if you know of other problems to add to this list, please email me.
- Appears/Disappears on Day X. Despite checking these boxes, I have never managed to get either of these things to occur. There are, however, many workarounds, the easiest of which is to set the creatures flag value, and change it to either 0 (to appear) or 1 (to disappear) on a given day.
- Destroy Items — Will only work in the northwest corner of the specified square.
- Select A PC, Certain Affect PCs nodes. In theory, if you call a select a PC, any further affect PC nodes in that chain should affect that PC and only that PC. But, for at least the nodes Affect Health and Affect Spell Points, no change occurs. This prohibits you from designing nebulous cauldrons with positive effects — e.g., the party comes across a cauldron, and is asked does anyone want to drink. If yes is pressed, they are asked to select a PC — that PC will not receive either the benefits or detriments from Affect Health or Affect Spell Points.
- The 100 Town Bug — Blades Of Exile says it can support 200 towns, but leaving any town numbered higher than 99 will cause the game to crash. (Theoretically, you could use towns 100 and up for end of scenario towns that can’t be left for any reason other than to end the scenario, which would provide a little more room, but I’ve never tried this)
- Windows v. Mac Dialogue! This should be a very well known bug, but I run into it all the time. The Mac dialogue screen is small than the Windows screen. Text that just barely fits in for Windows will be left out for Macs.
- Conveyer Freezes — If you open a saved game in an area where there are conveyer belts, they sometimes will fail to move any items on them.
- Changing Terrain with different light radi will have no effect. The town will remember the value of the original terrain, and display the light radius for that terrain, regardless of what it mutates into. I have been told this effect may work on MACs, I can say for certain it will NOT work on PCs.
- Inverted/Skewed Values — many things in the BOE editor have the wrong value to start off with. Crystal Wand and Prismatic Wand are inverted, Brew of Knowledge acts like a Weak Energy Potion. The Helm of Speed is set to power 0 (meaning no benefit). The SFX for Teleportal and Lightning Blast are switched. Many monsters are this way as well — Mauve Slimes start out the game as level 3 (summoning) creatures, quite a waste of a level 7 spell. Worgs and Wolves start out as friendly. One of the Unicorns begins the game as reptile. (Thanks to ‘A Short Term Effect’ for pointing this one out.)
If you change these values in Bladbase.exs, they will remain changed in any new scenarios you create, saving you the trouble of fixing these in every new scenario you create.
(Knowledge Brews created via Alchemy work fine, only those sold/found start off with the wrong values.)
- Stairway nodes can only be called as a result of moving. You can’t look to change levels, you can’t change levels in the middle of combat, you can’t change levels at the end of a timer. For normal stairways, this doesn’t matter. For forced stairways, you NEED to put in looking blocks and combat blocks.
- Hide Town just doesn’t work. The best workaround I can think of is to set rubble or something similar as the original town, then set the town to hidden, and have the rubble’s hidden value be a village. When you want the town hidden, reveal the rubble, and set a variable town entry flag to have the party enter a rubble filled area.
- Item Graphics — In a shop, the item graphic will not be displayed. Instead, the graphic (if there is one) 5 slots ABOVE the designated item graphic will be displayed. You can work around this by creating duplicate item graphics, 5 rows apart. See the pumpkin, pick axe, sack of flour, and loaf of bread in the GIF file for Redemption for an example of this.
- Outdoor terrain changes are forgotten after loading saved games. If you call a special to change a piece of outdoor terrain, that change will be forgotten if the player loads a saved game. This can be a VERY problematic node — the only way around is to surround the terrain with special nodes that call if upon a certain SDF. Problem is, Outdoor sections have very limited special nodes, limiting the ability to do this in relatively open areas.
- Attempts to create “Strong Strength” potions via alchemy won’t register. Pushing the button creates no effect.
- In the edit terrain box, you have the option of having custom terrain produce four different types of sound when stepped upon. Checking these boxes will not accomplish anything — all custom terrains will produce the footstep sound when stepped upon.
- Custom Weapons with the “Acid” ability will also exhibit the “Life Saving” feature. (Thanks to Taraka for pointing this out to me.)
- According to the BOE Manual, the Affect Party — Do Damage special node allows the scenario designer to vary the Pict. box. Doing so will supposedly only cause damage to the PC who triggers the special, if the party is in combat node. Unfortunately, this does not work.
- In towns, you are given the option of placing up to 16 different area descriptions. However, only the first 10 will work while playing the scenario.
- The Amulet of Life Saving starts out, in the Bladbase scenario, with a whopping zero charges.
- That last missile weapon in a group that possess special abilities will fail when fired. For example, if you have 6 exploding arrows, the first 5 will work, but the 6th will always fail.
There’s an additional twist to this bug. If you give a PC an ordinary thrown item that is placed immediately prior to a stack of another missile weapon with a special ability in that PC’s inventory, the ordinary thrown item, if it is last in the stack, will gain the special ability of the adjacent missile weapon. (Thanks to Andrew Barton for pointing these both out to me.)
- If a “place monster” special node is called within a town that would force the town to hold more than its maximum number of monsters, (30 for small towns, 40 for medium towns, 60 for large towns), the game will freeze.
- The Spell “Resurrection” does not require a Resurrection Balm, despite advertisements to the contrary.
- By far the strangest bug I have ever encountered deals with conveyer belts. Changing non-conveyer belt terrain into conveyer belt terrain will not work unless the town where the change occurs begins with a least one square of conveyer belt terrain as default. Without at least one square of such terrain as default, changing terrain will effectively change the graphics, but the changed-to conveyer terrain will fail to move either PCs, Monsters, or items.
- The Affect PC-Webbing Node’s values are reversed. Specials that add webs will in fact remove them, and specials that remove webs will add them. (Thanks to GazeDoom for pointing this out.)
- 100% in Blades doesn’t equal 100%. It’s closer to 95% as near as I can figure. Places where this becomes problematic are many, the two most notable are affect Statistics nodes, and creatures dropping items when killed. NEVER make a single creature drop something that is vital to continuation of the scenario, even set at 100% it will still fail to do so fairly often.
- Merging items wipes special classes if some of the merged items do not have a special class. For example, if you have arrows in your scenario that you give a special class, and the party brings in arrows from another scenario, and merges the two, NONE of the arrows will contain the new special class. For any combinable items that have a special class, make sure to give them a unique type class, so items from other scenarios won’t wipe them clean. You’ll still be vulnerable to the party taking items from your scenario, leaving the scenario, and then coming back in, but unfortunately there’s no way around this.
- Empties! Occasionally, for no known reason, the BOE editor will stick in little “EMPTY” monsters, who appear with the Dwarf with the two-handed axe graphic, are hostile type “A”, and have no stats whatsoever. No one has quite yet figured out why this happens, but the effect has surfaced in several different scenarios.
- Mac v. PC Graphics. Macintosh graphics are a bit darker than PC graphics, making custom graphics on default terrain look out of place when played on the other platform.
- Playing sound #22 (Opening Music) typically causes the game to crash.
- Creatures in one time place town encounters don’t check their life flag. For example, if you have a creature in a one time place town encounter with a life flag of 1, 5, that creature will appear when the one time place town encounter goes off, even if the 1, 5 flag has been set to 1.
- Using the “Record” option to capture text via conversation will produce strange results when the dialogue you are attempting to record has been produced via a special node. (Thanks to Brett Bixler for pointing this out.)
- Trap type #0 is listed as “Random Trap Selected”. This is incorrect, any traps set to #0 will always produce trap type #1 — Damage Single Character (Knives fly out).
- Whenever the “Place Random Items” function is used, if the editor places even a single item, it will inform the user that it could not place all items because the town item # limit has been reached, regardless of how many items are actually in the town. So, for example, if there a currently 4 items in the town, and the random item placer places 3 new items, it will inform the user that no more items can be placed, even though the town can actually hold a few dozen more. Thankfully, if this error is recognized, it becomes nothing more than an aesthetic glitch.
- It seems that any unused area descriptions are all automatically placed at 0, 0 in an outdoors section. Hence if you step on that space, you get to see “Rectangle X” in the box. (Thanks to Silver for pointing this out.)
- If you put a special class item in a crate and a party moves the crate in the game and then the special node checks where is the item (If-thens, Item with special class on a space), the node reacts as if the item was on the original space of the crate. This bug is especially bad because it makes a workaround for the lack of the node checking if the crate is on the space. (Thanks to Tigrene for pointing this out.)
- If two friendly NPCs occupy the same space, and they both have dialogued personalities, talking to either of them will cause the game to freeze.
|