Testing day

When I got home from work to day I made me two sandwiches and a cup of coffee and started Play Test #11. It went very well and I played through about 85% of the module (the fastest way) in about three and a half hour. I had my old portable PC beside and tracked every issue I found leaving the aesthetic things out. I leave them for a prettiness test later. And now I thought it's about time to bore you with the list :)

Here it is, the ZORK ISSUE LIST. Warning potential spoilers ahead!

ISSUE 01: Missplaced item in front of the house in Start Area 1
ISSUE 02: The Music starts too fast when entering the different areas
ISSUE 03: No Jeweled Egg Placeable in birds nest
ISSUE 04: Game Score message boxs pops up in the cutscene conversation of the large tree
ISSUE 05: Due to ISSUE 04 the double amount of points are given in the tree conversation
ISSUE 06: The Outside House Area is still saturated
ISSUE 07: The Garlic Icon has to be changed
ISSUE 08: The trap door in the cellar needs a better closed description.
ISSUE 09: Solve the play once only music problem
ISSUE 10: Replace the Non-Zorkish painting in the Troll Room
ISSUE 11: Replace the ugly water fall in East-West Passage
ISSUE 12: Game Crashes when entering the Round Room Area
ISSUE 13: The Thief Jumps to PC routine is cursed
ISSUE 14: The Troll and the Cyclops generates loot.
ISSUE 15: Check the Hole placeable in East-West Passage. It may be the wrong model.
ISSUE 16: The wall texture in the Engravings Cave looks strange
ISSUE 17: No engravings placeables in the Engravings Cave
ISSUE 18: Make the Wall placeables in the Dome Room no fade
ISSUE 19: Make the rope placeable look better when droped on the floor
ISSUE 20: No bat cloud was triggered or seen when entering the Dome Room
ISSUE 21: Fix the torch icon
ISSUE 22: Make the granite wall in the Temple smaller
ISSUE 23: Check all statue(creatures) the seems to be barely hurt
ISSUE 24: Fix the Egyptian floor texture
ISSUE 25: No animation on PC when opening the coffin
ISSUE 26: Make a better drop item handler. Maybe a destroy/create
ISSUE 27: The prayer doesn't take you to the woods
ISSUE 28: The black book has some unfinished links in it
ISSUE 29: The black book doesn't kill the PC when burned
ISSUE 30: Fix the different key icons
ISSUE 31: Remove the curse item routine on the Trophy Case
ISSUE 32: Check the Hole placeable in East of Chasm. It may be the wrong model.
ISSUE 33: Destroying the Painting doesn't work correct
ISSUE 34: The combinations of items allowed into the fireplace seems incorrect
ISSUE 35: The "door" in the hole in East of Chasm needs to be non visible
ISSUE 36: Make a platinum bar placeable and attach the sound VFX to it
ISSUE 37: Fix the walkmesh in Loud Room
ISSUE 38: Check the Hole placeable in Reservoir Areas. It may be the wrong model.
ISSUE 39: Black light squares in the Reservoir Areas
ISSUE 40: The bridge walkmesh in the Reservoir Areas is gone
ISSUE 41: Fix the cave sky dome
ISSUE 42: Create a new Hades sky dome
ISSUE 43: The sounds of the Reservoir Areas are messed up
ISSUE 44: Fix the Walkmesh Helpers in Dam Area
ISSUE 45: No animation when trying to take the tool chests
ISSUE 46: Complete the raising water script
ISSUE 47: Fix the water pipe model
ISSUE 48: Fix the punctured boat script
ISSUE 49: Fix the Control Panel model
ISSUE 50: The Water Fall sound in the Dam Area is strange.
ISSUE 51: Fix the walkmesh helper in the Round Room
ISSUE 52: No Zork lore on paintings in Mirror Room
ISSUE 53: No It feels hot here floating text in Cave
ISSUE 54: Black light squares in Hades Area
ISSUE 55: The spirits are pushable
ISSUE 56: The candles goes out when dropped to the floor even if unlit
ISSUE 57: The spirits aren't cowering at PCs unearthly power
ISSUE 58: The spirits doesn't flee to in the right direction
ISSUE 59: Fix the undead in Hades
ISSUE 60: FallDownHere trigger sometimes fails
ISSUE 61: Fix the AutoClosing door timer in the Maze
ISSUE 62: The statues in Maze 5 doesn't stand still on their places
ISSUE 63: No Bag of Coins on the skeleton in Maze 5
ISSUE 64: Create the water triggers
ISSUE 65: Create all the thief's jump points
ISSUE 66: Fix the mirror model
ISSUE 67: Fix the mirror VFX
ISSUE 68: No animation on touching the mirror
ISSUE 69: The Floating Text in Cold Passage says "Hello World"
ISSUE 70: No chilling wind sound in Cold Room
ISSUE 71: No water drip sound in Atlantis Room
ISSUE 72: The magic boat turns when spoken to
ISSUE 73: The magic boat conversation has broken links
ISSUE 74: No animation on deflate
ISSUE 75: Freeze camera on boat travel
ISSUE 76: Fix the buoy animation and texture
ISSUE 77: Make the boat move faster
ISSUE 78: Fix the boats route
ISSUE 79: Make the cave door to Sandy Cave non visible
ISSUE 80: Make the lightable torches work or remove them
ISSUE 81: The shovel isn't shoving up on the inventory model when equipped
ISSUE 82: No digging sound
ISSUE 83: The digging animation don't stop at the end of the conversation
ISSUE 84: The digging animation looks crazy with female PCs. Maybe unfixable
ISSUE 85: Make the Sandy Cave look better
ISSUE 86: The dark spot in Sandy Cave is too dark
ISSUE 87: Connect Frigid River Area with Aragain Falls Area
ISSUE 88: PC can't force boat over waterfall
ISSUE 89: Remove Air Elemental sound set from boat
ISSUE 90: No bird VFX at Forest Path
ISSUE 91: No walkable rainbow
ISSUE 92: Waving the Scepter doesn't do anything

I suppose it could been worse. I have faith!

Thanks for reading, as always!
/A

Multiplayer play-through

I feel a bit guilty for not updating this blog so often as I would like. But today I felt so much better that I at least give you a screen shot from my first multiplayer test session.

My wife and I spent 4 hours playing through the mod. I let her follow my walkthrough and did the job of being the side-kick and writing down bugs, errors and flaws on yellow notes. (The desk is full of them now.) It seem that not everything that worked fine in single player works in multiplayer. Several of the key creatures AI and such don't work as supposed. The torch, lamp and other importand items suffer from the same problems as the non-working torches in the OC. Suddenly the don't provide light anymore. I have to catch up on that old topic again and see if I can make a repair function that keep those items work in all situations.

Besides the almost 150 errors we found (mostly in the Game Score System, the Take Placeable functions and in the Animation scripts) we also found a few things that could make the game less fun to play. It's not my fault :) the original game had this in it too. I'll try to correct it with changing how certain things work and add a few new ways to solve puzzles to get around it. We also learned that Zork can be a pretty difficult game to play and that I really need to prevent the players to get stuck or lose interest because of that. I'll include a in-game hint book. I need to come up with a penalty system for "cheating" first.

They play test gave a hint of the lenght of the module. I took us almost four hours to complete it. Except for the two puzzles that are left to implement due to a missing area. I'd guess it the length for a clever player that don't have the walk through would end up in between 5 and 8 hours and maybe even up to 12 hours for if you're making everything difficult for yourself. I said to my wife, that if the mod was filled with the usual encounters and fights from the DnD-world one could play it for about 25 hours! "Don't think about it!", she answered, and she's right.

Anyway, it was great to get this first multiplayer session done and it gave me a whole new view of the state of the module. Lots of things left to do. Some things works very well, others don't. The next few weeks will be bugfixing all over before I do another test. I'll try to do updates more often even if they will be shorter.

Delania and Amraphael
starting the multiplayer play-through

Thanks for reading!

/A