Messages

I guess we'll just have to go and make ourselves some GK fan games then

I'm not sure if miez meant it as a joke, as the smiley would indicate, but I'm treating it as a serious suggestion. GK fan games have been suggested before, so certainly there is an interest in this sort of game. The argument against a fan-made sequel has been that Jane might just return to the series and do a GK4. But this seems less and less likely, I'm not even sure who owns the rights these days.
But the real issues I see with creating a sequel is that 1) only Jane really knows the characters. Every game has shown us some new side of them, and I doubt anyone but her could really do them justice. 2) The style of the games requires MASSIVE amounts of research - that perfect blend between fact and fiction would be nearly impossible to achieve in a fan made game. I'm currently writing a GK-like mystery game, and the only reason that I'm able to handle the huge amount of historical fact is because half of it has to do with film history, which I've been studying for six years (more than that if you count my interest in the subject before university).
So I honestly don't believe in a "real" GK game made by fans. What I WOULD like to see are spin-off games using the characters from GK, just like Night of the Hermit does with MI. Imagine a Detective Mosely game, or maybe a historical game starring one of the earlier Schattenjagers of the Ritter family. That could be one hell of a game.

Give the flyer from your mail to the man behind the counter. Maybe you need to ask him about it too, I don't remember exactly. But you have to say the right things to get it as I recall.

I'm well aware that this isn't what you're asking about, but I just have to say it:

QFG2 is the best RPG ever, and yes, it IS an RPG dammit, much more so than those silly old SSI and Westwood games. To computer gamers roleplaying seems to mean two things: You have a party (usually of four characters) and you have a LOT of stats visible to the player. And that misses the whole point about roleplaying, unless you come from the old school of "mazes are fun" D&D players. What roleplaying DOES mean, is that you play, even perform, a role within a piece of fiction, which is EXACTLY what adventure games allow you to do. And the game mechanics aren't supposed to be visible as rules and stats, they just are in tabletop RPGs because it's the only way to do it (unless you play freeform games).
To transfer this to a computer game, without using the CPU to hide the game mechanics is utterly absurd. Yes, to the computer everything is numbers, but I don't want to know about that. It's like playing a shoot-em-up with the debug function turned on, so you at all times could see the exact number of hitpoints of damage that a certain shot made.

Sorry, but it had to be said. I can't really recommend anything. The Diablo games suck (click'n'slash), and I doubt NWN would run on your graphics card. If you want a REALLY old game however, try Darklands, that was an exceptional game.

I don't know if it worth wasting CJs time with. I don't think it's something too many people would have any use for.

Have you checked your mail? Have you been to Seattle?

MHawk, thanks for your answer, yes that was what I meant. I figured out that it can't be done with the current version, because you are only allowed to use one font for all the dialog (all characters speak using the same font).

Looks lovely, great work. It could do with some more foreground than the grass though, maybe just the silhouette of a tree trunk at the side of the screen or something. But then, I'm assuming this is a clearing in the woods and there's trees behind the "camera" as well. That might not be the case.

Great work though, there's an excellent texture to the grass and leaves and the rays of light are beautiful, I could see a problem creating walkbehinds for those though, not to mess up the perspective.

Is there any way at all to use italic or bold fonts within a message or dialog line otherwise consisting of a normal font? The reason I'm asking is that a lot of movie titles are mentioned in my game, and I'd like to avoid too many quotation marks.

KQ5 was evil, lots of walking deads (as well as sitting-tied-up-in-a-basement deads) and one of those horrible Sierra mazes (the desert) that you have to map out while saving and restoring a hundred times. Not to mention the time limit on getting the items and exiting the tomb.

KQ3, now, that's a great concept. Sure, it has flaws (time limits and random encounters), but the whole idea of snooping around the sorcerers house and turning his own magic against him was great. Without the pirates and with an expanded final chapter in a devastated Daventry it would be on my top-20 list for sure. I hope Tierra takes it on after QFG2VGA, and redo it totally like they did with KQ2.

I never was a huge fan of KQ6 (although I remember playing "girl in the tower" again and again while trying to rewire a pair of old speakers ). It was just too episodic for my tastes - sure lots of fun islands to explore, but no real connection.

KQ4 on the other hand I remember with fondness. The shift between day and night, the ghosts in the creepy old house, the living trees in the forest, the three witches. There was a darkness too it lacking from the earlier games (Dracula's castle was never REALLY scary). Also it set the standard for the time-honored device of grave robbery in adventure games Plus you got to play a girl for probably the first time in graphic adventures (I remember at least one female player character in a text adventure, Plundered Hearts).

Edit: I don't remember much of KQ7, but the Nightmare Before Christmas rip-off world was cool.

Let me guess, the guy who survived the ambush turns out to be the one who killed your father?

Yes, Vel posted a similar question on the tech board http://www.agsforums.com/yabb/index.php?board=2;action=display;threadid=6778 the day after I posted mine. Unfortunately nobody has replied to his post yet.

Dorcan, thanks for the script. I'll have a closer look at that when I get home. The only problem I see with this (in what I'm trying to do) would be that it doesn't allow for hyperlinks within the text. So maybe I'll end up with a dialog-like interface but use the FileReadRawLine command to avoid the message limits.

Is there any kind of standard for screen gamma settings? I find that almost any kind of game is WAY too dark on my screen, even when I've adjusted it with the Adobe Gamma tool which comes with Photoshop (the manual brightness and contrast controls on the screen are set to max).

Often I solve the problem by cranking up the gamma or brightness within those games that allow it, but it makes me wonder how other people see the graphics I make on my computer. I remember that Under a Killing Moon had a nice little feature where it asked you to adjust your screen so a grey silhouette of Tex Murphy was just visible against a black background. That way you knew that you played it exactly like the designers intended. But unless you create something like that in your game, asking the player to adjust his screen after yours, you're pretty much screwed if the images look too dark or too bright.

I believe it's Poser 4 for the characters, am I right? With the additional Michael and Victoria characters, not sure which version of those. I think Poser is great for adventure game characters because it's so easy to create different view angles for the same animation (question for terranRICH: Do you turn the camera or the character when doing the different angles? Is there any easy way of rotating the whole animation rather than doing it frame by frame).

The problem with Poser is that unless you put a lot of work into custom textures, morph, clothing etc. you end up with that classic Poser cookie cutter-art look.

Edit: Not to put down terranRICH's great initiative, but keep in mind that it would be nearly impossible to create additional animations for the characters without Poser and not have it look wrong. So you'll probably need to make more than just walking animations. At least speech anims, and maybe some kind of pick up/using animation.

Sounds too complicated for me. I suppose I'll have to rethink it and limit myself to the few database entries that are actually necessary to proceed in the game. Maybe I'll just do it as a disguised dialog, where you choose search topics on a list instead of typing them.

Yes, I suppose you're right that GK1 does count, although its approach was more ethnographical than theological in my opinion - and was much less detailed than GK3, presumably because we are assumed to be familiar with most elements Christianity.

Thinking of it, there were also a couple of religious references in GK2 (The Black Madonna and the shrine at Altötting), but I really didn't like the way you used divine interference to solve a puzzle. On the other hand, it would be fun with a SCUMM-like interface that had a "pray" command

Is it at all possible to create a database accessible from an AGS game? I'm thinking of something similar to the occult topics database on Sidney in GK3 (which, I think, was coded in some sort of html-like language).

I know that you could easily do it with different room files and creating the text as graphics, but is there any way to create an interface that retrieves data from, say, a text file? Or could you display messages (either global or room) in a certain fashion, as if on a computer screen, for just this one room? (I think the message limit could be a problem)?

Any suggestions?

After reading up on the gnostic gospels, my game will delve much further into real religious practices than I had originally intended (don't worry, no damn templars, I promise). I'm not a religious person myself, so to me, this might as well be something I had made up for the game, but I think historical facts make games so much richer, like the GK series. And it fits perfectly with the original plot.

What do you guys think of using real world religions in games? The only time I can recall it being done, except in the "here's a cross, it will ward off vampires"-fashion, was in GK3 where it was used (or at least pretended to) in quite controversial ways. Of course there's always Odysseus Kent too, but I suppose humorous games are allowed to poke fun at the clergy.

Did anyone find the religious themes of GK3 offensive? Or were anyone turned off by the central position of religion in the game?

The trouble with name generators is that they're great for finding ideas, it doesn't know your character. Even IF you could specify the personality of you character, It can't base names on etymological meanings, metaphors or on sound-alike adjectives, or on references to other works of art, unless it's been pre-programmed for it, which would in turn make the name stereotypic.

Once again, I have to refer you to an article at the great screenwriting site wordplayer.com:

http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/wp09.Name-dropping.html

(in which you will find invaluable information such as: "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once wrote a short story featuring a detective named Sherrinford Holmes, and his sidekick, Ormond Sacker.")

Edit: I would, by the way, like your feedback on Dinah Burroughs as the name for a player character, and Konrad Grau/Conrad Gray as the name of a German film director who fled to America in the 1930's and changed his name accordingly. I'm not going to explain the reason for the names, as I'd much rather hear the associations you get from them.

LOL, that's great. I chose "heroic names", and it came up with Tex Tungsten. Now THAT's exactly what I needed for my game

I was trying to come up with a last name for my game character this morning, and it made me wonder, how much thought do you put into the names of your characters (player as well as npcs), and do you have any special techniques for choosing the perfect name?

It's easy to forget the importance of names in defining a character, but sometimes these are more memorable than the title of the game itself - sometimes they even ARE the title. I mean, Larry Laffer, Zak McKracken, Roger Wilco, Guybrush Threepwood, Bobbin Threadbare, King Graham, Indiana Jones, what else would you possibly call these characters? Most of these names are of course jokes, puns, something out of a comic book, names you could never look up in a phone book (or maybe you could, but that's a scary thought).

But how about "real" sounding names then? Let's look at them. Even bland names like Sonny Bonds have a certain ring to them that make you associate (cool 80's narcotics-cop a la Sonny Crocket), and Lara Bow, if nothing else, suggest the 1920's by referring to the actress Clara Bow. But for the life of me I couldn't recall the name of our brown-suited hero in PQ4, so I had to look it up: John Carey. Obviously it's bad. Or I would have remembered it. Could it be any more dull? You might as well call him John Smith or Fred Jones. It does nothing. It just... sits there. Ok, so we might read something into it... Carey, caring, that sort of thing, but still, why this name? So apparently, you just can't choose a name at random, it needs... something to set it apart.
But on the other hand, some "cool" names, like Boston Low, Max Payne, Ben Throttle, are just too much. They're supposed to sound real, but they remind me of that Simpsons episode where Homer changes his name to Max Power. It's difficult to take seriously. David Wolf (old espionage game by Dynamix) should probably be on the list too. Gabriel Knight is right on the edge. If it wasn't for the explanation of his past and the logic behind the Ritter-name, I'm not sure I would have bought it. Especially not when put together with the first name of an arch angel.

I'd like to hear your take on this, and maybe some of you could explain the thought process behind the names of your characters. I'm sure there must be some interesting anecdotes.