Tuesday News AddendumLet's start of with an obvious bit of news. Debuting at number one in the NPD Group's Top 20 Computer Entertainment List for the week of 6/25/00 is none other than Blizzard's Diablo II. After the incredible success of the first Diablo it would have taken a miracle for Diablo II to not be number one.Not to let Diablo II hog all the glory, Black Isle Studios' Icewind Dale has also made an impressive showing earning a second place slot on the list. Blizzard has released a second patch to owners of Diablo II. The list of bug fixes in the v1.02 Patch are as follows: Major bugs - Fixed a bug that deleted your single player or open character if you deleted a Realm character with the same name. - Fixed several bugs to improve memory usage--those bugs could cause the game to slow down after playing for a while. - Fixed a bug associated with ejecting the Play CD. Minor Bugs - More consistent closing of dialog boxes and pop-up screens when hitting Esc key. - Fixed a bug to allow faster drawing of the auto-map. - Will auto-close some NPC menus when necessary. - The automap can be toggled when a waypoint is active. - Game log file names follow the format D2YearMonthDay.txt There was one more fix which I decided to leave out of the update since it is a minor spoiler. New bits of information on Troika's upcoming RPG Arcanum have surfaced from Programmer Jesse Reynolds and Artist Sharon Shellman. Identifying NPCs as "main-story": Yes. You can ID and NPC in a mod as "main-story" and hard code a portrait to them. Although this will need to be done via a message file (so it's a little more complex - but definetly do-able). Naming convention for portraits: Yes. The portraits have a naming convention. A three letter prefix code, the first 2 specify race, the last 1 gender. So ELM would be elf male and ELF would be elf female (didn't that one work out cute?) :o) Scripting and object modifications: There's a difference between "object modifications" and scripts/dialog. Nothing prevents you from re-using scripts & dialog between modules. The only thing to be aware of is that if you reference *specific* areas/locations or use Global Variables, you would need to adjust those to be correct for *your* module. Obviously, if you were making scripts/dialog to be re-usable you would want to avoid doing something like that anyway (you don't want someone referencing Tarant if there isn't one in your mod :) ). Object modifications would include: Attaching a particular script/dialog to an object, changing an object's name, changing its stats (Strength/spells/etc.). You can't take a particular instance of an object and copy it into another map, but you could create another instance of the appropriate object, make any custom changes you might want (perhaps none), attach the scripts & dialog you want ("GenericMerchant1", for instance) and be good to go. Arcanum is the first effort by Troika Games, a new developer with several members of the original Fallout team along for the ride. Promising an engaging storyline, and highly customizable gameplay, Arcanum is ready to set the PC world ablaze later this year. The only question now is, will you survive the PC RPG onslaught long enough to experience it?
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