3D Megadoodoo posted:Except it's vector art, not bitmap. A little off topic for this thread, but ❤️ dat obscure poo poo... Apple II version is like 40k on disk, and there's a hundred screens or so. They only have a few hundred bytes to define a picture, not counting program and text. So it's all procedural vector art. My guess is that they store the coordinates of vertices of line segments that make up a closed shape, and then they run a flood fill (paint can in MS paint) to give it a color. There's a few other Japanese text adventure games for the early PC-6601 (predates PC-98, PC-88...) that have just as slow of a processor but much higher resolution, b/c Japanese. So you can see them draw in shapes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxEg2l_SIIc&t=369s or the ZX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJ9LuK5Tcgg Note there's no curves / Bézier splines like you'd get with Adobe Illustrator or Flash. It's too much to ask out of an 8 bit micro. So they rely on Bresenham's Line Algorithm that'll let you compute the pixels on a grid that make up a line without using multiplication or floating point numbers ... because, uh, the 6502 simply didn't have that faculty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bresenham%27s_line_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midpoint_circle_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_fill
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Nov 18, 2021 18:36
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Randalor posted:If this were Infocom, I would have said "Try looking 2 or 3 more times" because I'm pretty sure they pulled that bullshit in at least one text adventure. Yeah, but that was The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where the game actively tries to prevent you from entering a room because it's supposedly dangerous in there. I don't have the transcript, but it goes something like >NORTH You don't want to go north, it's too dangerous. >NORTH Seriously, no good will come of this! >NORTH Really? Certain death awaits. >NORTH Throwing caution to the wind, you enter the engine room... ENGINE ROOM Nothing to see here. >LOOK ENGINE ROOM No, really, there's nothing here! >LOOK ENGINE ROOM Oh, all right. You see several consoles and blinking buttons. (Maybe we were being needlessly cautious about entering the engine room.) I always loved that gag and didn't see it as bullshit at all. Now the "how to get the babelfish" riddle, that was bullshit. Dave Syndrome fucked around with this message at 14:03 on Nov 26, 2021 |
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Nov 26, 2021 14:00
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The babelfish puzzle was just trial and error. You die to it once and then you savescum I was stuck at the part right after the airlock for years
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Nov 26, 2021 18:34
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Coffee Jones posted:A little off topic for this thread, but ❤️ dat obscure poo poo... One of the upsides of the later Sierra games (Larry, Space Quest, King's Quest, etc.) using vector art is that it's easy to get rid of the awful dithering and replace it with solid colours. Scummvm at least does this and it's very unobtrusive and nice.
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Nov 26, 2021 19:49
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I'm surprised no one mentioned Daggerfall yet Daggerfall had massive semi-procedurally generated dungeons described as "octopi having sex" with literal miles of identical-looking hallways. Lining these hallways were lots of torches, which normally did nothing but make the area a little brighter. However, in one main quest, you had to find a unicorn horn, which was behind a hidden passage that could only be accessed by clicking on one of these otherwise identical, functionless torches. Nothing in the quest dialogue or anywhere else suggested that this would work. Also, anyone who claims they finished the Mantellan Crux final dungeon without a walkthrough is lying.
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Nov 27, 2021 00:03
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Hobologist posted:I'm surprised no one mentioned Daggerfall yet Also the game can bug out with dungeon generation making it impossible to complete. Honestly I think I should daggerfall unity a spin just to see if it improves on it vastly.
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Nov 27, 2021 19:22
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Hobologist posted:I'm surprised no one mentioned Daggerfall yet is daggerfall the one where you can ride your horse off the side of your boat and trot through the ocean for like 20 minutes and find yourself in the last dungeon?
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Nov 28, 2021 11:24
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blatman posted:is daggerfall the one where you can ride your horse off the side of your boat and trot through the ocean for like 20 minutes and find yourself in the last dungeon? I did this! It was weird to have just randomly discovered that, but yeah, the boat map is the same as (or at least very close to) the location for Mantellan Crux. Also, Daggerfall Unity is What Daggerfall Should Have Been, bug fixes and all.
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Nov 28, 2021 12:44
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Lawman 0 posted:Also the game can bug out with dungeon generation making it impossible to complete. If you don't fall through geometry holes every two minutes (not an exaggeration), it's already an improvement. I got Daggerfall the day it released. You might think you know buggy games, but you haven't experienced true bugginess unless you played unpatched Daggerfall.
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Nov 28, 2021 14:39
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Random Stranger posted:If you don't fall through geometry holes every two minutes (not an exaggeration), it's already an improvement. My dude it has a simplified dungeon generation option so dungeons are now merely big instead of gigantic and it fixed almost all the bugs (and most exploits) so now things will actually look right. Also you can mod it to look good or even  pick your quest style
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Dec 1, 2021 03:56
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I know it's been mentioned already, but if you want the super secret GRANDMASTER ending for Wizardry IV you had better brush up on your knowledge of Jewish mysticism!!!!
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Dec 18, 2021 17:33
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TheHoosier posted:I know it's been mentioned already, but if you want the super secret GRANDMASTER ending for Wizardry IV you had better brush up on your knowledge of Jewish mysticism!!!! There was such a good LP of that game in let's play. Honestly incredible that it was at all greenlit.
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Dec 21, 2021 16:49
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Lawman 0 posted:There was such a good LP of that game in let's play. Honestly incredible that it was at all greenlit. it is from the era of games where greenlighting meant three dudes smoking weed and coming up with what the next game's gonna be about
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Dec 21, 2021 16:59
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Lawman 0 posted:There was such a good LP of that game in let's play. Honestly incredible that it was at all greenlit. I probably looked like the Charlie Day meme trying explain all of that game's fuckery to a buddy. I like the game, but c'mon guys
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Dec 21, 2021 22:22
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Peanut Butler posted:it is from the era of games where greenlighting meant three dudes smoking weed and coming up with what the next game's gonna be about Also players who had started with Wiz 1 complained that Wiz 3 was too easy so Wiz 4 was made partially out of spite I assume people stopped complaining after that
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Dec 22, 2021 02:51
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Wasn't Wizardry 4 designed by a fan that complained that the others were too easy, so Sir Tech basically told him to design a sequel that he would find challenging?
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Jan 2, 2022 17:01
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Silhouette posted:Wasn't Wizardry 4 designed by a fan that complained that the others were too easy, so Sir Tech basically told him to design a sequel that he would find challenging? Not really; Roe R. Adams III is the scenario designer, and while he wasn't the designer for 1-3 he had worked with SirTech previously as both a tester and a manual writer. He was definitely something of a super-fan when it came to adventure games though, having written columns and reviews for multiple magazines.
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Jan 3, 2022 08:15
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