Byakhee

These files are provided totally free of charge and is totally unsupported. The author or site host cannot be held responsible for any damage or loss or revenue, etc. caused by the use of this software.

Call of Cthulhu is a registered trade mark of Chaosium Inc.
All images used on the investigator sheet are either © Chaosium Inc. or © the Delta Green Partnership.
Published by arrangement with the Delta Green Partnership. The intellectual property known as Delta Green is ™ and © the Delta Green Partnership, who has licensed its use here. The contents of this document are © David Harvey, excepting those elements that are components of the Delta Green intellectual property.
If any copyright or trademark messages are incorrect, please let me know!
The Cool Byakhee logo was created by Tolga Yanasik [home page]

Q. How do I create my own rule packs?
A. I had hoped to produce a more in-depth ByakheeScript programming guide, but I currently do not have enough spare time. In the meantime, use the following quick guide:

Q. Where is the source code to Byakhee 3?
A. You can get the source code from SourceForge

Q. Can I translate Byakhee into another language?
A. It's easy to translate the sheets, handouts and rule packs - just open them in a text editor. Feel free to put them on your web site or whatever once they're done. It's a bit harder to translate the dialogs and messages in the program itself and is beyond the scope of this Q & A.

Known Issues
Byakhee does not function correctly on Windows NT. If the screen resolution is much below 1024x768, the investigator sheet will appear much too small (it will print OK, though). To make matters worse, the cause for this is not known...

Subject: Review of Hero Games Call of Cthulhu Creator software
Date: 04/09/99
To: strange-aeons

"I purchased the newly-released CoC Creator software from Hero Games today, and have been working with it all evening, so I thought I would share some of my thoughts and feelings. The product is billed as "Complete Character Creation Utility Software". I paid $25 US, which is list price.

Production values are a bit thin. It comes packaged in a VCR tape box of the cheapest manufacture I have ever seen, with a short manual produced in black and white on a photocopier. Program is on two 2.5" floppies. But production values and packaging are not really important when one buys software. The proof is in the program.

The windows interface works well, and is pretty slick overall. There are some annoying problems which I might consider bugs, but could also be explained away as just rough finishing or lack of final testing. The first is that when you "roll the dice" to create your new character, a window pops up covering the results which requires you to make several decisions and comittments about the character BEFORE YOU CAN SEE THE DIE ROLL RESULTS!! I tried three different ways to get around this problem, but the program is cleverer than me, and successfully prevented me from moving any of the windows either before or after the coverup. Then if you want to reroll, you must discard that character and start over. This is not a stopper, only annoying, but compares poorly with the slick "reroll" buttons provided on both of my "freeware" CoC character generator programs. There are a couple of other annoying limitations, each of which can be worked around with a small kludge, nothing crucial.

The really nice things about this program are the extensive lists of equipment, tomes, spells, entities, and weapons included. When clicked upon, each of them automatically prints out on the character sheet, with some background information. For the equipment and weapon lists, the embedded costs automatically subtract from the money available to the character. This is a cute feature. This program prints out the "back" of the character sheets as well as the fronts.

However, once character creation was complete, and the character sheet was printed out, I found myself disappointed. The overall appearance of the sheets is inferior to that of those printed out by Byakhee, and as pointed out before, Byakhee is freeware.

So, overall, if anyone is interested, I will be happy to send you my copy of Hero Games' CoC Creator Software for $15, including shipping anywhere in the US. I'm going back to Byakhee." - Chick Lewis

Reproduced with permission