<Username> on 3/8/2025 at 20:25
Interesting. I thought it was a small oversight or even a bug. Can you describe what the technical issue was with making the notes page available at the beginning of the mission?
DirkBogan on 3/8/2025 at 23:53
From memory, it would have been possible to include a Notes page from the beginning if it was the first page rather than the last, but we opted to keep the Maps/Notes sequence unified across the campaign and in line with the original games.
The reason is that you can't tell the engine to display arbitrary map pages within an existing range, only modify the minimum or maximum index to be shown. In this case, frobbing the map triggers a QuestVarTrap that changes the variable 'map_max_page' from 0 to 3, which tells the game to show all pageXXX files in the intrface folder up to page003 rather than just page000. You can't tell the engine to only display page000 and page003, but not page001 and page002.
So your choices are 1) Notes page first, 2) Notes page last until you find two extra maps and then it's stuck in second place, or 3) Notes page last but invisible until you find the extra pages. We opted for the third. If there's a custom scripting method around this, we couldn't find it and/or it was way too low a priority for FireMage to tackle with everything else he had to wrangle.
EDIT: going back through the dev logs, I think we also considered having the new maps as pages000 and 001, and changing the map_min_page instead, but we were concerned that people wouldn't realise the maps had been added before the map pages they already had.
<Username> on 4/8/2025 at 06:42
That is fascinating. Thank you for the detailed explanation, DirkBogan. I learned something about how the map screens work. :)
dankirk on 18/8/2025 at 20:05
I watched a play-through vid for this mission that showed a scroll on the Elder's desk regarding a keeper who hanged himself. That scroll wasn't there in my game. I played on expert, is it not there on expert?
LtHargrove on 18/8/2025 at 22:10
I remember reading that letter. I've just checked the campaign files and it is there. It's a reference to Sound of a Burrick in a Room btw.
baeuchlein on 24/8/2025 at 16:08
I looked into the mission via DromEd, and dankirk has a point here. The letter is not in the part of the mission which the player can access, at least not in the beginning. It can be teleported somewhere else during the mission, which is possibly what brings the letter onto the Elder's desk. I did not find out what makes the letter appear there, and neither do I remember whether it was there during my playthroughs, but it is very likely that the letter appears on the desk once the player does something - whatever that is. I also can't tell whether there is any difference in this depending on the difficulty level.
