The Eye of the Beholder Thread

[affablePeafowl]

Unkillable Cat On EOB2, there are names 'ALLABAR', 'WILLIAM', 'CIRCE', and 'APHRODITE' in the executable file. If I remember well, I saw those names on some game screenshots. Do you have any idea if those are playable characters ?

Could they be the names of the default party?

Those names would be a lot better. The default party has a dwarf named "Stumpy" (complete with quotations) and a guy named Wolfspirit. Can't remember the others offhand, I used them for a while because they're actually a great party.

Interestingly though ALLABAR is the name of the Fighter in *EOB1's* default party. The others don't sound familiar at all. It sounds like it was just a random party some guy in the PR dept. made for promotional material, but if it's in the .exe maybe it was intended to be the default party at some point.

 

[Null Null]

I suspect a lot of these are the names of the developers' D&D parties. The default party in Dragon Wars was Muskels, Theb, Elendil, and Cheetah, and I think Theb was the head of the thieves' guild in the Bard's Tale Construction Set default game.

 

[Elwro]

As for writing 1101 in binary using switches -- I'd expect four switches to be enough

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I still need to finish the GBA version if EOB.
Still kind of amazed about this version

https://www.dungeoncrawlers.org/post/eye-of-the-beholder-c64/

Latest update I can find:

 

[Sleeper Grey]

it is immediately apparent that the portraits look very very different in EoB3, the most obvious being that the portraits are stretched longer vertically making everyone more gaunt. My fighter was the slightly chubby male fighter in chainmail, so it's not too bad. Anya actually got a palette makeover and looks even cooler than she did in EoB 1 and 2. Amber was already fairly slim in EoB2, and now stretched vertically she looks a bit ill, but poor Ileria became a complete mess. Already not the tidiest of portraits, the new palette made her look even more messy than she already did, and thankfully with ASE3 I managed to change her portrait to one of the more recent EoB3 starting portraits, keeping her as a blonde female and giving her a red hood.

Oh my! It seems you have witnessed the infamous EOB3 Portrait Trouble.

I am one who knows it well enough as I have undone most of the worthless harm that EOB-3 "artist" did to EoB-1/2 portraits.
As I have reversed around 36 problematic portraits in this game using EoB-1/2 originals.

I did not care about Amber portrait yet but Anya was -not- treated so well by EoB-3 artist, either.

He has spoiled 3 things adout her hair,
3 things about her face,
3 things about her figure/body.

Please let me name it.

(1) Her hair became cut 2 times shorter.
(2) It became lifeless: no more "saw-tooth" spikes as in EoB-1.
(3) Finally, In EoB-1 her hair was held with one steel ring. In EoB-3 we have 2 baubles which is less fitting a fighter.

Next,
(1) in EoB-3 her eyes are narrow slits, not wide open as in EoB-1. (it's common crap with EoB-3 portraits.)
(2) Her brows (very prominent in EoB-1) are very pale pink in EoB-3, nearly unseen.
(3) Finally, her mouth has become much wider. Beauty, eh? In EoB-1 she was not a frog or a toad. In EoB-1 her mouth is small and elegant

Her figure,
(1) Her shoulder in EoB-3 became thin & puny. It is very stupid, as she was the 2-nd most physically strong NPC in EoB-1 after the Dwarven Prince.
(2) Her "new" body has become smaller in EoB-3 in relation to her head. As the head was -not- repainted in EoB-3 that much, unlike the body.
It is stupid because of the abovementioned reason. She was never a puny character.
(3) Her "new" armor in EoB-3 became too common, no character in it.

Obviously she liked her EoB-1 armored bra better


Let me say I have returned it all to her.


Wiping also away all the crap done to 27 other portraits in EoB-3 and fixing smaller problems in 8.

You are welcome to consider it, there is an "EYE.RES" ready file downoad. All better portraits included.
Some changes are illustrated.


https://www.old-games.ru/forum/thre...pravlenie-portretov.91989/page-4#post-1767908

(The download is at the end of the post. If you want to read the text as I did not translate it for English forums yet, please use Google translator)


P.S.
Also there are separate portraits archives download - for those who like to play with daesop.exe pack utility...

P.P.S.
I shudder thinking what these "artists" might have done to Amber portrait, in EoB-3. Perhaps I should look into it.

That Red Hood female portrait was badly messed up in EoB-III too. But it was fixed one year ago already.

 

[Eisen]

Are EOB portraits original or derived from some D&D work?

 

[Sleeper Grey]

Are EOB portraits original or derived from some D&D work?

Indeed. There is a famous notice some portraits were based on real people working on this game

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=24426
https://imgchest.com/p/3na7kbq78dk

"A number of the portraits in Eye of the Beholder were Westwood employees. These include Paul Mudra (Music and Design), Phil Gorrow (Lead Programmer and Design), Joseph Hewitt (Lead Artist and Design), Mike Legg (Programmer and Design), Frank Saxxon (Artist), Aaron Powell (Artist) and Eydie Laramore (Lead Writer and Design)."

Mainly they created new characters for NPCs but included them into D&D lore:

https://www.sageadvice.eu/in-the-ey...colony-how-much-would-you-consider-canonical/

Great work

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Are EOB portraits original or derived from some D&D work?

I don't recognize any of the Eye of the Beholder portraits from D&D/AD&D artwork.

 

[pjs]

I ran through EOB1-3 with the same characters, with the goal to maximise the power of the characters at the end. As recommended (back in page 5 or so), I chose human paladin, dwarf fighter, human mage and human cleric. (Level caps on other demihuman characters are annoying in EOB3; thief is not really necessary and I could use Insal to fill in the blanks in EOB2.) My goal was to explore almost everything and grind the game so that I could get to level 18 at least and the mage could cast level 9 spells. As an afterthought, maybe the paladin could have been switched to pure fighter, as the paladin special abilities (except a few weak spells) haven't been implemented in the games.

As has been stated before, EOB is very different from gold box games in the sense that even if you explore everything, you get so little XP that level caps are not even close. A thorough exploration of EOB1 grants you about 150K experience per character. I didn't keep track of EOB2, but I think it would have been around 300K additional XP without grinding. EOB3 gives about 600K additional experience. In order to achieve my goal of maxing the characters, I did a couple of hours of grinding in EOB1 Kenku nest (about 500K extra XP -> everyone reached the L11 level cap or even above). In EOB2, XP grinding is much faster: I trained about 1.2 million XP in about an hour or so by sitting next to the lever in the greater guardian lair (forget about using the fireball trap, next to the lever is 10x faster). So, I intentionally grinded more xp that was necessary to achieve level caps in EOB2 (about 2,1M total xp at the end of the game, mage a bit more as I used the level-up from the dying elf there). So when I started EOB3, after killing a few monsters, the levels raised after each kill to 15, 16, 16 and 17. The mage obtained L18 and got access to level 9 spells in level 2 of the temple of Lathander, and the cleric got L20 just before the end battles.

Obviously, the games were very easy with these supercharged characters. I rarely even bothered with casting spells, the front row warriors equipped with a long sword and a short sword just chopped everyone to pieces very easily. If I recall correctly from previous runs, EOB3 is rather easy no matter what you do. And this was really just a pointless exercise of maximisation, because you don't really need any of those high-level spells in EOB3.

The bottom line here is that if you want to do some grinding, the lever by the EOB2 guardian lair is ideal for this. Kenku lair in EOB1 also works for smaller amounts of XP. The undead beasts in the mauseleum in EOB3 seemed to be rather painful in contrast, but I didn't really try it that much. So, if you want to maximise the characters in EOB3, you really should do some uber-grinding in EOB2.

Btw. in dosbox-x, the EOB1 crashes at start unless you start with 'loadfix'; in EOB3 you have to use something like 'loadfix -20'. I finally managed to update EOB3 to Aesop/32 engine manually; various installers didn't seem to work properly.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I ran through EOB1-3 with the same characters

Sounds like peak-performance min-maxing, I approve.

The weird bit about EOB3 is that the hardest dungeon... is the Mausoleum at the start. It has the nastiest traps and most threatening monsters. Almost everything after that can be resolved by a strict regiment of spells (True Seeing, Haste, Prayer, Underwater Breathing when needed).

 

[Glop_dweller]

For the long time EOB1 fans... Here is something not found in the clue-book; found it way back, while searching the walls:

AFAIK it is the only button of its kind in the game.

Spoiler

This spoils what it does:

Spoiler

It disables the Mantis attack during the level 10 special quest.

I have edited the portaits before, but I had problems with palette issues, and far heap errors. I'd like to know how some of you clever fellows have managed to insert your custom portraits (and sprites?).

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I guess the dos ending for EOB1 was never fixed. I finished the game on the Amiga first so whrn I saw no real ending to DOS I was pretty annoyed.

Is transfer pretty flawless with GOG copies? Failing that I guess all-seeing-eye is an option.

 

[Glop_dweller]

I had read [decades ago] that they did not think that enough people would complete the game, to justify the additional floppy disk it would take to hold the files.

The original Blood&Magic by Interplay did not ship with the intro to the game, though it was in the demo. That game would play the intro if present. It would not surprise me if EOB could play the file if present; or with slight hex editing.

Either way, I think GOG could have played the outro via batch script, and used Bink or other for the video.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Lol. That's frikken ridiculous. I remember the ads and praise reviews of the game. Compared to Dungeon Master or Black Crypt the game was so easy a toddler could beat it. Fucking fun regardless. Dungeon Hack still pisses me off the older assets not included. Btw, the only real decent way I found to print maps from DH is a couple of screenies, slap together, edit it and laser color print. It isn't the fastest way to get random maps but you could convert that dungeon to pnp if you wanted to. We used to use dotmatrix printouts and they were awful. I'll snap a photo when i find one.

 

[Glop_dweller]

Dosbox has built in image/screen, video, and even midi capture that is accurate regardless of framerate. That's the best way to do it.

The hotkey for screenshots is: {CTRL} + F5

https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Special_Keys

____________

Yeah... I was playing Dungeonhack just a few days ago.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

For the long time EOB1 fans... Here is something not found in the clue-book; found it way back, while searching the walls:

AFAIK it is the only button of its kind in the game.

Spoiler

This spoils what it does:

Spoiler

It disables the Mantis attack during the level 10 special quest.

Hang on - the rewards for that level's Special Quest are the rings dropped by the Mantis Warriors that are spawned in. Doesn't this negate that reward?

 

[Glop_dweller]

It might be a developer aid; perhaps forgotten to be disabled.

*But the functional button asset is there... I have not seen it used anywhere else.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Mantis vaporized to never spawn. Their broodmothers would cry bugoid tears if they could.... can't even eat the dead mantoids.

Anyway, GBA had tactical but I imagine creating EOB in FRUA engine might be better... maybe.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

And to think.. this started it...


Gygax legacy indeed..

 

[octavius]

An AD&D game where your Thief (preferably multi-classed) can't backstab? Disgusting.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I thought you could backstab in eob? D&D cartoon... never. Even with ultra invisibility cloak. Kill the kids and equip yourself. Even that unicorn horn us magical for teleportation.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I thought you could backstab in eob? D&D cartoon... never. Even with ultra invisibility cloak. Kill the kids and equip yourself. Even that unicorn horn us magical for teleportation.

Nope, no backstabbing in the EOB-games.

No detecting or disarming traps either.

But hey! Thieves can pick open some doors! Namely, the doors decided upon by the devs.

Thieves got shafted in the EOB-games.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

What about Dungeon hack? I swore I did a BS in Hack. That is gay shit though. Royal shaft.

 

[Glop_dweller]

But hey! Thieves can pick open some doors! Namely, the doors decided upon by the devs.

Thieves got shafted in the EOB-games.

Also, the game deletes the key [of type] when the lock is picked; they disappear from the shelves where the would otherwise be found.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

But hey! Thieves can pick open some doors! Namely, the doors decided upon by the devs.

Thieves got shafted in the EOB-games.

Also, the game deletes the key [of type] when the lock is picked; they disappear from the shelves where the would otherwise be found.

I know this happens with the Silver Keys on the second floor, and some of the Dwarven Keys on the fourth/fifth floor, but does it happen with all the Dwarven Keys?