Grimrock

Sorry that this has been a long time coming, things have been absolutely manic here lately. Every time I think it's getting better, it gets busy again! My wife and I are currently living out of temporary accommodation while we figure out where our next jobs will take us and I'm also doing a bit of extra work for my clients while I'm at it too.

Anyway, I have found a bit of time to put together a first draft of how I envision a Notebook to work. You can see a video of it here...
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2rfBgD ... FWZnNSUnc/

You should watch it at 720 using the cog in the bottom right of the video or the download button on the top left of the page if you want to be able to read the writing!

Features:
1. You can drop notes onto the book and they will be added (these notes are not editable).
2. You can click 'Add Page' to add an editable note and type a note into the note book.
3. You can tear any page of the notebook out (including ones you have written) and they exist in the game world.
4. Notes placed into the book are still the same note they always were - the book is a container, so if the note is a quest item etc, it's not destroyed and recreated.

Notes / Problems:
1. Typing is a bit of a pain in the backside as I don't think I can prevent numbers from flickering the character panels for instance.
2. You can't add spell scrolls, as they use the 'spell' property to draw the spell grid (not an image) and I can't get at this in the mod. I can work around this for the default scrolls, but not user-made spells. I'm considering hacks.
3. You can essentially create an infinite number of notes using this mod, so you can create blank pages to drop on pressure plates etc.

Any further suggestions as to how this should work gratefully received. Will tidy up the code a bit in the meantime and look at releasing on the Nexus soon.

H O L Y C R A P P E R O L I !!!!!!!!!!!!

That's extremely impressive programming, to me at least. Wow, bravo!

That is a unbelievable work John, that you have done with this notebook till now.

I can´t wait to test it and use it in my mod. It is exactly that what I´ve imagined in my dreams.

Thank you very much for all of your work till now.

Hi John...

That is just AWESOME, like everyone else cant wait till its released good work..

That's some cool work done, even more then was asked for!

JohnWordsworth wrote: Notes / Problems:
1. Typing is a bit of a pain in the backside as I don't think I can prevent numbers from flickering the character panels for instance.
2. You can't add spell scrolls, as they use the 'spell' property to draw the spell grid (not an image) and I can't get at this in the mod. I can work around this for the default scrolls, but not user-made spells. I'm considering hacks.

On numbers: that's prolly something we have to life with since the numbers 1 to 4 are used to toggle char screens on and off. I doubt you can prevent the game from executing this basic GUI function by scripting unless AH added something in the last update that allows to disable this. Wasn't there something like that done for/with "Toorum's Quest II" or the snake mini-game in original ORRR?

On spell scrolls: maybe the solution is to have a separate spellbook working like a multi-paged spell scroll. As far as i understand spell scrolls the rune grid shown is drawn on mouse-over after the rune = ''<several_letters_from_A_to_I>"; line in their definition. You prolly can't access that line by scripting yet is might be possible to trick the GUI into displaying that mouse-over image for/on a spell book page.

Thanks for the positive comments guys!

What's really nice is, because it's just a container - you can easily fill it with notes (pages) before you give it to the player just by using lots of addItem(spawn("note"):setScrollText("Welcome to this book...")) commands. I think I will make an 'immutable' version of the book too, which will allow you to pre-construct books with up to 10 pages in (with some being left blank as 'editable_pages') but you won't be able to tear pages out / add pages.

Hope to brush off some of the rough edges this evening or tomorrow and get an 'alpha' build up to the Nexus in the next couple of days. It will require a bit of testing before it's done I expect - so any help on that front would be greatly appreciated!

I gotta tel ya John I would give my Left Arm to code the way you guys do, man I wish,,(LOL)

I don't know what you mean by testing, but consider me your Guinea Pig LOL..