The Great Book BETA 0.83 released

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http://www.baronius.szm.com/GBBG/index.htm
The early beta version of The Great Book of Baldur's Gate and Tales of the Sword Coast has been released.
Its quite unfinished yet (many parts are missing or incomplete), and probably contains several bugs.
We need everyone's opinion and suggestions, they would greatly help us to make the further beta versions and the final version better and smarter for players.
Could you tell your opinion?

[ February 21, 2004, 20:40: Message edited by: Baronius ]

 

I really like this program so far. The "Wizard Spell Setups" section is probably my favorite as far as design and functionality go. In all, a very nice looking and helpful (even though I have played the game MANY times, and most of it is old news to me) program. If I was a first-time player, I would probably like it even more. I would (personally) like to see the same attention given to druids, clerics, and bards (and perhaps even fighters) that is given to mages, paladins, and rangers. I can't wait to see the full and finished version. At any rate - Excellent job so far - keep up the hard work, and kudos to everyone that worked on it.

Bug Report:

Under the "Battles" section, occasionally (usually when clicking to Silke's battle, but other times as well) I get an error: "Access violation at address 0046FFDF in module 'BGBook.exe'. Read of address 00A3000B (or 00A30002, or 00A30013, etc...)" This generally only happens when I have clicked from the top or bottom to Silke, and then from Silke to the Chess game.

Otherwise, not other bugs that I have noticed yet.

 

Keep up the good work i look forward to seeing even more informative things from this program.
So far i have encountered no bugs whatsoever and everything seems to work perfectly.

 

What is this mod and what does it do?

 

@Morsmordre - It's not a mod. It's a hint/game info program. Information about tactics, secrets, item locations, spell info, class stuff. Things of that nature.

 

Excellent work!

Maybe you could add list of quests in the game. It would help playing a lot (it is damn hard to remember which areas had quests).

Also, NPC section, with tips how to use them effectively could be good.

There could be more information about spells. Like description of every spell and how to use it, or is it almost useless. Plus "this scroll is found..."

And information about hidden items. It is boring to check their coordinates from walkthroughs.

Yeah, quite long list, but you asked for suggestions.

 

Oh, thanks Falstaff

I'll d/l it and have a look.

 

I am very glad to see that these few reviews are basically positive, but critical as well! Keep posting! I look forward to more posts, from more people too!

One of the most important tasks of this program is to give help to beginners.
I apologize to all users who are experienced players and find many parts of this program boring.

We plan to include those too. It is much work however, I am not sure it will be added to the first version (v1.00).

That is a known bug and very annoying.
I did not think it is so common, but since you are not the first who reported it, it must be fixed as soon as possible. The solution will be most likely to install a newever version of the Object Pascal IDE.

The suggestions you have listed there are excellent, some of them are brilliant!

We are thinking on tips for useless/useful spells, and more detailed help for each spell than there in Advice section; the spell descriptions might be problematic though. I will look into this matter deeper, especially from legal aspect, because spell descriptions are in manual, in game, in AD&D too -> copyright. If you click to any ability (Strength, etc.) in Location section, you will see its description and the last line is "Official BG description of...".

As far as quests and NPCs are concerned, I agree.


Here is some additional information about GBBG, which can be used as FAQ despite there are no questions. I got several comments about GBBG from other aspects too from people, this can help answering them.

We plan to make GBBG online, so all information will be available in a website. We consider the application as necessary, because many people have slow(er) internet access, and anyway using a program is faster than browsing in a website.

BGII versions? Many people were curious about this. We plan a BGII version too, yes. The first date of an early alpha version can be Nov-Dec 2004 though.


There is still very much work with this program.
And the work we will invest into it depends on the success of it as well. Development needs much energy and time.

I repeat myself: Keep posting! All (even miniature) ideas, suggestions, and highly critical comments are gladly accepted too!

 

Why are you making this in Delphi?
In vb.net or C# the GUI would look alot better and probably easier to make.
For storing of data you could just use an xml file to draw the information from, making it alot easier to update the information.

Other than that great program and a cool idea

 

Thank you for the good advice, technical help is also invaluable for us.

The original plan was to create only one file, without data files.
Currently, we are trying to update the programming enviroment to a newer version; that should stop the problems.

The problem is that I have been programming in pascal for 6 years, and practically I am not good in other programming languages yet.
What is C#? Is it like C++? I have a friend who is good in C++, as far as I know.
I don't like Visual Basic, I will avoid using that if possible.

 

C# is a relatively new programming language based on C++ and Java and other languages. They have pretty much taken the best from all languages and put into C#. If you use C# with the Visual Studio IDE it is extremely easy and fast to make dektop applications and ASP.Net applications with.

Also fetching data from databases and xml files and such is very easy and straight forward...

I strongly recommend you to try it out if you have the chance.

I agree that VB wasn't a good language in the 6.0 version, but the new version VB.Net is just as good as C# and other languages. It's basically a whole new language. Real easy to learn if you haven't done that much programming before.

But if you are good with Pascal I recommend checking out C#. It's just fun....

 

Where can I get a trial version of C#?
If that is not possible, I will buy it.

 

You can try this link for some basic info and some downloads(codesamples, etc...)

There is no real trial version of C#. You can ofcourse just use notepad and hammer away there, but that is alot of heavy work and you're missing the best part of the .Net framework which is the Visual Studio IDE.

For the .Net SDK go here
This will give you the compilator and things like so that you will be able to write applications in notepad and compile them.

For a trial version of the IDE go here

 

Thank you a lot. I am going to check those when I have time. I will try the trial, and then probably buy the full.

 

No problem.

Let me know if you liked it. If you did I have some E-books you can have that are very good.

 

Actually, UI in Delphi is as easy in both VB.NET and C#. Oh, and regarding UI, you can simply drop an XP manifest onto your form, so that us XP users would enjoy the UI more.

Oh, and I got access violations in just about every section of the program. Watch your pointers!

 

That is the consequence of addition of normal (short) strings to longer (255+) ones. I have been unable to fix this problem yet. Using external data files is a better solution I know, but I wanted to make it in one file. So if you click e.g. to Ajantis, the program detects it and uses the Memo1.Lines.Add('255string1'+'255string2'+'255stringN') to add the proper text of description to the memo window. I suppose this is the reason of the problem. Any suggestions?

 

Ooh dear. I stopped using Delphi (Version 1 at that time) when I was 13, so I can't be much help. You know, you could design the whole system using a set of HTML pages, and if you want to deliver them to clients then you can just embed the IE control in an MFC-based app for ease of use.

Regarding external text files, you really want to use XML (and write everything in Unicode).

 

I know it needs an entirely new application, but I just cannot free my mind of that "Read of address ...." error. I want to find out why does it do that.