Wasteland 2: Apostles of Quarex welcomed! BETA IS OUT!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Wasteland 2: Apostles of Quarex welcomed! BETA IS OUT!

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Oh boy oh boy oh boy :neckbeard:

I never played Wasteland, but I love the Fallout series and Obsidian Entertainment in ways the Church probably would not approve of, so this is fantastic news. Funding this.

Smol posted:

Allowing the backers to insert their lovely little memes to the game is a big minefield. Hopefully they'll stay fairly low-key. Following the same rule Tim Cain had in Fallout 1 ("If the player doesn't get them, they shouldn't even notice them") would be wise, but maybe not possible, when they've already promised that 100 backers can insert their item/NPC/location/statue/whatever to the game.

They can always take the FO2 approach and make it a perk/luck based random encounter between actual locations, rather than sticking it in the middle of a settlement somewhere.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2012 19:03

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 21:43

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

gently caress it, now I need to play New Vegas through again with a new character concept.

Which means I need to update all of my mods.

:suicide:

_{It might actually be easier to find a copy of Wasteland and get it running in dosbox, now that I think about it}

# ¿ Apr 10, 2012 19:17

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Evil Fluffy posted:

Steps for playing Wasteland in DOSBox:

[...]

Thanks!

And I'm pretty sure that it's not :filez:

per the Underdogs clause, although HotU themselves seem to have lost their download during whatever the most recent disaster to befall them was.

# ¿ Apr 11, 2012 00:40

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Occupation posted:

Actually, it's worse than that. Most NMAers will/have bitch(ed) about FO2 as being not a "true" sequel to FallOut because of the various (minor) gameplay changes, it not being developed by Interplay (only published), ...

Wait, what? They were both developed by Black Isle, the only difference is how tightly BI was bound to Interplay at the time. :psyduck:

# ¿ Apr 11, 2012 01:54

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Woebin posted:

Nope! It's a lot of the same people, admittedly, but Black Isle didn't exist for most of Fallout's development period and it was released under Interplay itself. Tim Cain's Fallout postmortem from GDC was linked earlier in the thread and touches on that. It's also really, really interesting. Everyone should watch it.

My understanding was that the devteam responsible for Fallout (and later PS:T and FO2) was formed as a separate division within Interplay before development started on Fallout; they just didn't get the name "Black Isle" (as opposed to "Interplay Orange Division" or whatever they were called before then) until after FO1 was released.

# ¿ Apr 11, 2012 02:27

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Seashell Salesman posted:

Firstly Toxx Claws is the best suggestion so far, secondly why did that thread get unstickied? I can't find it now.

Because it raised the target amount. The thread title is now "We got Something Awful into Wasteland 2" if that helps you find it.

# ¿ Apr 12, 2012 15:18

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Quarex posted:

Apologies for not responding to that--I forgot whether it was in the Kickstarter or the other Wasteland 2 thread, but I know when I posted my last response I thought "huh, I feel like there was some other reply I needed to make..." I appreciate the feedback, I do not know how the hell I would be able to understand playing Wasteland without hearing the promotion or full-auto sound effects. I presume you are saying that DOSBox does not emulate PC Speaker, so I would need to do at least part of it on my actual DOS machine. Which still works great, as evidenced by my magnificent Stunt Island production for the other thread.

DOSBox does emulate a PC speaker and it'll make screenshot and video recording much easier.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2012 00:05

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

FPzero posted:

I've never played the original Wasteland, nor Fallout 1 or 2. I loved New Vegas, which I know is completely different as far as genres go. Nevertheless, I pledged $50 to this game because why the gently caress not. Plus SA's getting into the game. I've gotta be a part of this somehow.

New Vegas plays completely differently, and is packed more densely, but the locations, characters and stories nail the "Fallout feel" pretty well.

Also, all you people who liked New Vegas but haven't played the originals, Fallout 1 and 2 are on GOG and Wasteland is abandonware and runs in dosbox. You have no excuse. :colbert:

_{He says, starting up New Vegas again.}

# ¿ Apr 13, 2012 13:52

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Quarex posted:

Me too, though it really does make sense--the publishers did not believe there was interest or that it was worth their time. He finally did something to demonstrate that he was right all along. The only problem is that now he has moved beyond needing their help crap now I am smugging too

I am so

right now

Also $2.5M is the point at which everyone gets modding tools, right?

# ¿ Apr 14, 2012 00:50

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

AxeManiac posted:

That would be interesting, I was hoping somebody would do a Goon Total so we can see how much SA helped the game.

I'm still amazed at nearly 3 million dollars from 50,000 people, that is mind blowing to me that so few people could raise so much. Makes me rethink a lot about how successful some failures are, like when you hear a game only sold 120K copies and is still considered a failure.

Depends a lot on the game, though. Dungeons of Dredmore sells 120k copies at $5? They've recouped the development costs and then some. Call of Duty sells 120k copies at $60? That doesn't even cover a tenth of the marketing budget.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2012 17:28

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Splicer posted:

So I never finished the original wasteland. Are there any recommendation as to the best way to go about playing it? are there i.e. any programs with the texts preloaded and I can type the description numbers into, or any recreations or anything?

As far as I know there are no remakes or engine overhauls for Wasteland; your best bet is playing it in Dosbox.

I also don't know of any programs with the texts preloaded, but I have a text file somewhere with transcriptions of them all and could write such a program pretty easily.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2012 21:22

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Splicer posted:

So I never finished the original wasteland. Are there any recommendation as to the best way to go about playing it? are there i.e. any programs with the texts preloaded and I can type the description numbers into

So I went ahead and wrote this. Linux executable. Windows executable. Lua source code (run with 'lua wl_paragraphs.lua'). (If you're on OSX and really want this, run the scripts directly, or help me make an OSX version of Enceladus to package it with.)

The source code, of course, contains massive Wasteland spoilers.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2012 22:05

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Quarex posted:

Edit: Especially since, as I just realized, since I never once imagined there would be a reason for me to play through Wasteland again out of the blue this year, I left my Wasteland Paragraphs book at my parents' house when I moved. I will use your program soon!!!

Let me know how it goes!

I don't have the original to check it against, so let me know if there's anything obviously wrong or misnumbered or the like.

Your boundless enthusiasm in this thread has convinced me to make Wasteland my next laptop game.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2012 22:50

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Shadley Puffin posted:

If anybody wants me to, I can list all the needed fixes in a text file, but really other than 26 the thing is pretty drat solid.

That would be fantastic. Pastebin it or something and I'll update the program accordingly.

Category Fun! posted:

If anyone's interested, I'm currently working on a very basic flash version of the Wasteland paragraph book, because ToxicFrog isn't reppin' my Mac boys. Also I guess it'll work in a browser if you're just not into executables.

Hey, I want to support OSX! But cross-compiling for OSX is a nightmare, and I don't have the budget - or space - for an actual OSX dev machine.

That said, if you know someone with an OSX build environment, Enceladus should be a pretty straightforward build (cd build/macosx && make), and once the mac version of that is available I can package things for OSX from Linux no problem.

I could also probably put together a shell script for the paragraphs on OSX, which might be faster. OSX does make it easy to run shell scripts, right?

# ¿ Apr 15, 2012 05:04

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Coolodile posted:

This Kickstarter has finally motivated me to give the original Wasteland a try. I assume its impossible to have more than one save with a game this old, right? And where would I find the DOSBOX save files anyways?

The 'game1' file in your Wasteland directory appears to be the save game. There's also apparently a 'game2'. I'm not sure what that is. Quarex?

# ¿ Apr 15, 2012 05:13

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Quarex posted:

Chrome told me that the Wasteland Paragraphs .exe is PROBABLY a malicious file, so I reported you to the FBI Police army ToxicFrog; hope that is all right.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2012 06:14

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Seashell Salesman posted:

Are you asking for the binary produced by build/macosx/Makefile? It builds fine for me and appears to do whatever it does. Are you looking for someone to run it at your Wasteland paragraph book lua scripts? I'm happy to help OSX people out I guess.

I just need the binary - enceladus supports "cross-embedding", so if I have the osx binary, I can tell the linux version of enceladus to target that and generate an OSX package. It'd be great if you could upload it someplace.

That said, if you feel like generating it yourself:

code:

$ ./enceladus wl_paragraphs.lua wl_paragraphs_text.lua
$ mv wl_paragraphs.lua-enceladus wl_paragraphs
$ chmod a+x wl_paragraphs
$ ./wl_paragraphs

and see if that works.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2012 06:41

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

FauxGateau posted:

I put down $50 since Obsidian is now on board. So look forward to a lot of bugs and a lot of heart!

Man, how much must it suck to get screwed over left and right by the publishers and end up with an undeserved reputation for bugginess as a result.

Shadley Puffin posted:

Alright, the fixes necessary to make the digital version of the Paragraph Book the bitchinest, dreamiest, Tiger Bot-iest paragraph book ever are now up on Pastebin:

http://pastebin.com/iZGh5Xy9

It's really just the worst of the errors. I left alone all the extra commas, because, drat, the book really, really loves its commas. And please go easy, because I've never used Pastebin before.

Excellent! I've corrected both the transcription errors and the typos you noted.

Get your Wasteland paragraph book here: Linux | Windows | OSX | Source

It would be nice if someone with OSX could test that version and report back, I have no way of knowing whether it works.

vvv Yeah, so did I.

ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Apr 15, 2012

# ¿ Apr 15, 2012 15:25

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

pyrotek posted:

Is it a Power PC app? I'm guessing so from the .osx extension. You can't run those anymore in Lion, the latest version of OS X.

I don't think so? I just gave it that extension to distinguish it from the linux version.

Here's what file(1) has to say:

code:

$ file wl_paragraphs.osx 
wl_paragraphs.osx: Mach-O 64-bit executable

# ¿ Apr 15, 2012 15:48

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

pyrotek posted:

Well, I can't get it to work. I could very well be missing something, though.

Try this:
- download it
- open a terminal
- cd to the directory you downloaded it to
- chmod a+x wl_paragraphs.osx
- ./wl_paragraphs.osx

Does that do anything?

# ¿ Apr 15, 2012 17:03

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Shadley Puffin posted:

For anybody having trouble with the Windows executable for the latest paragraph book release, it was compiled without the Lua library and dll this time. So pop on over to Sourceforge at http://luabinaries.sourceforge.net/download.html to pick up the lib for your platform (I used the 5.1.4 dll). Plonk the files inside into the same directory as the program and you're good to go.

Or, you could report this as a bug and I'd replace the uploaded version with the statically linked version that I meant to use originally. Re-download and you're good to go.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2012 20:40

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Shadley Puffin posted:

Oh, oops! Thought that might have been deliberate, to reduce the size or something. I shouldn't have assumed.

Nah, there's two options for the windows package - static (bigger executable, self-contained) and dynamic (smaller executable, requires lua dll, can load lua extension modules). It defaults to dynamic and I forgot that.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2012 21:42

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Baggot posted:

I'm a bit confused by the $30 reward tier. I thought everyone who donates at least $15 can get a Steam copy of the game. Wouldn't that likely include Mac and PC versions? Why would you have to donate $30 to get that.

The linked thread says:

quote:

An extra digital download of the game in any format. Many people wanted to be able to get a Mac AND a PC version, or PC and Linux, or even an extra PC version for a friend. Now you can.

Which confuses the gently caress out of me. Each copy of the game is for a single OS? If you want to play it on two OSes, you need to buy/preorder the game twice? :confused:

What the gently caress is this?

And yeah, if it's on Steam a Steam copy would get you mac and PC versions automatically anyways.

TheHock posted:

e: The only thing that bothers me about the tier is the "Exclusive Ranger Portrait Collection."

I know it's kind of spergy of me, but if I'm going to roll-up my own characters in this type of game, I'd like to be able to customize their appearance as well. Maybe there will be a billion portraits in the game, but it still kind of sticks in my craw.

They've already said that you can import your own portraits if you want to; the $30 tier just adds some additional built-in portraits to choose from.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2012 23:40

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Comic posted:

Just hours ago I said I'm not sure what they could do to make me up to $30.

I guess between more 'official' customization options, an extra copy, and a novella, something there was enough.

Don't forget the video interviews with the dev team.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2012 23:57

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Kickin' it up to $30.

Fintilgin posted:

It's gonna be an 'exclusive' .jpg file, and the game allows custom portraits. Within 15 minutes of the game being released on Steam you'll be able to google "'exclusive' ranger portraits" and stick `em in your game.

Other exciting kickstarter digital 'exclusives' that the common folk will NEVER SEE include digital copies of the soundtrack and art book .pdfs.

By the same reasoning, the $15 tier is equally pointless because an hour after the game comes out you'll be able to search for "wasteland 2 torrent" and download the entire game. Only tiers that give you actual, physical objects are worth anything! :sigh:

# ¿ Apr 16, 2012 00:34

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Mordaedil posted:

This is the least likely outcome, sadly. Mostly because LucasArts holds on to the rights for that very tightly and refuses to acknowledge its existence.

For some reason Lucasarts is really reluctant to admit that there was a time in which they made good games.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2012 14:23

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

a cow posted:

Imagine if they come up with an Arcanum-style brick of a manual, you'll be kicking yourself for missing out!

Personally, I already have little enough space, I'd rather have a PDF.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2012 17:24

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

waqii posted:

I tried to get into Wasteland recently, and though I liked the setting and the crazy enemy types you could run into, I couldn't really get over the interface and the fact that a miss-click could effectively wipe out your entire party or severely screw you over if you just so much as went from one area to another (which makes the game auto-save)

Wait, what? How? :ohdear:

This sounds like a good argument for playing it entirely with the keyboard.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2012 18:10

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

theblackw0lf posted:

So at this rate it looks like it's just going to miss the 3 million mark (ending around 2.95 million). Unless things pick up.

I really like having modding tools available.

Badguy posted:

Put in $30.

As much as I like Fallout 1+2 I was hesitant about offering funding because I never played Wasteland and I'm not expecting this to fill that void. If it were a kickstarter for some kind of Van Buren revival then I would have thrown money at it, but with this I would have rather waited a while, see how the project is shaping up and then donate if it appeals to me. But there's a deadline and that $30 bracket is hard to resist.

For me it was a no-brainer even not having played Wasteland: all of the Fallout and Wasteland devs, working together on a sequel to the game that inspired the creation of Fallout in the first place? gently caress yes, sign me up.

Also, I wouldn't be surprised to see at least some of the ideas from Van Buren in there; ISTR Avellone or Fargo saying something to that effect. We probably won't see Van Buren as originally envisioned at any point, but between Wasteland 2 and New Vegas, I think most of it will get used somehow.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2012 18:32

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

HiriseSoftware posted:

This, or play the Apple II version, which does not have mouse support

DOS version looks better. :colbert:

_{Or so I'm told.}

quote:

Edit: I neglected this thread for a while (despite being a big Wasteland fan) and got back to it yesterday and I regret not being able to help with the paragraphs app

Even with it done now, knowing that so many people are willing to help with it gives me the warm fuzzies. :unsmith:

# ¿ Apr 16, 2012 19:03

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Evil Fluffy posted:

Or just making backups of the save file. It's far easier to copy&paste between folders than it was to swap disks back in the day. Haven't had a need to do it yet myself for WL, but I did it for the SSI Gold Box AD&D games when I tried to play through the Dragonlance trilogy.

I can't stress this enough. You're likely playing with DOSBox and can have the A: folder open to alt tab between freely. Save often, backup often, breathe sigh of relief often, Quarex do a LP.

Honestly, at that point it's easier to just put the entire game directory under git and tell it to git commit -a every time something changes.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2012 01:16

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Seashell Salesman posted:

This is a fantastic idea. I had been thinking about playing Wasteland through in DOSBox but couldn't be bothered to fiddle around with copying disks over each other all over. The changesets will be complete nonsense though

Eh, it'll just say "binary files a/game1 and b/game1 differ" for each one. :v:

I figure this should work:

code:

#!/bin/bash

if git status | fgrep -qv 'nothing to commit'; then
  git commit -am "$(date)"
fi

sleep 60
$0

Checks for changes and commits them once a minute.

Dragonrah posted:

I do miss going to the store and discoving a hidden gem, though most of the time it sucked.

Some of the time it sucked, but it was so worth it for those times you fish Terror from the Deep, or System Shock 2, or Total Annihilation, or Arcanum, or Homeworld out of the bargain bin.

Yeah, those were all games I got randomly fishing through the cheap games at my FLGS. Easily makes up for the times I ended up taking home something like Omega Boost.

ThePutty posted:

You seriously don't play any multiplayer games because of a few bad experiences?

Have to say, Tribes 2 is still hands down the best multiplayer experience I've ever had and I found the community remarkably chill and tolerant.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2012 02:54

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

univbee posted:

One issue with Wasteland is that the manual is required to play the game. For those not in the know, 5.25" disks were so short on space that the amount of text in the game wouldn't fit in the memory the game had to work with, so the game would spit up "read paragraph XX" messages during the game, which you would then have to consult using the numbered paragraphs in the manual.

Is there a version of the game that re-implements the text into the game itself? Part of me feels this shortcoming hamstrings re-release efforts, the closest existing system that would work would be using Steam's overlay web browser.

Adding the text to the game itself would be kind of a bitch. However, earlier in thread I wrote a program that contains all of the paragraphs and spits them out on demand; someone else is working on a Flash version, and a JavaScript version should be totally doable as well. And since a GOG release of Wasteland would run in dosbox, you could easily alt-tab to the program.

gently caress, I should have done it in JavaScript. That solves all the issues with releasing for OSX. Stand by.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2012 15:13

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

FRINGE posted:

Wouldnt that be a pretty low-effort modification by modern day standards? Its a trivial amount of text to insert into the game at the needed points. Sure, the fake paragraphs would be gone, but at least the game would be out.

Similar to PS:T, anyone that "hates reading" is never going to play it anyway, so added in-game text should flow right along with the tempo of the game just fine.

OR!

Actually it looked like I badly overestimated how difficult it would be to insert the text directly into the game, since someone has written a complete set of editing tools for Wasteland.

_{I'll finish my System Shock editor one of these days.}

Of course, you still have to read it in that tiny text box, I think (unless - does Wasteland have a message-display mode that uses the entire screen or something? Quarex should know.) Still, shouldn't be too hard to unpack game1 and insert the full text of each paragraph into the game.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2012 15:45

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

HiriseSoftware posted:

Wasteland does not have a full-screen text mode. What you see on the bottom is what you get.

Alright. In that case - barring someone else hacking a full-screen text mode into it - I think I'd prefer to read the paragraphs externally anyways. Some of them are pretty long.

But for people who don't mind reading them in-game, inserting them into the game wouldn't be hard.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2012 16:23

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

The old Paragraphs program is dead, here is the new one :siren:

This one is CSS/HTML/JavaScript based; it should work in any modern browser, including the Steam Overlay. It's also entirely self-contained, so you can save it to your Wasteland directory and open it in the browser from there without trouble.

Type in a paragraph number, press enter. I've tried to add proper paragraph quotes and <blockquote> tags where appropriate, but I also didn't want to read anything too closely so I may have missed some things.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2012 17:07

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

HiriseSoftware posted:

I wasn't able to get this to run properly in IE9, so I made some JavaScript changes, as well as added a few of the paragraph breaks that you missed. Also, to more closely match the actual paragraph book, I changed the font to Book Antiqua/Palatino and I added indents and it now shows the paragraph number next to the text. I also added links on the right and left of the paragraph entry box so a user can read the paragraphs sequentially if they wanted to, if they happened to be kicking back in their best lounge chair under a shady cactus.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/74505464/wl_paragraphs_v2.html

Nice improvements! Although I don't have Book Antiqua installed, so it just uses the default font.

Also, looking at the javascript, :stonk:

what is wrong with IE that required those changes?

# ¿ Apr 19, 2012 22:29

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

HiriseSoftware posted:

Internet Explorer has issues with getElementsByName() so I use getElementById() for all of my web stuff. Plus it wasn't centering like I was expecting, so I had to add some CSS as well.

IE always has to screw things up for everyone.

quote:

I have Book Antiqua on my Windows 7 machine because I have Office 2007 installed, so that might have been it. If you're using Linux, I added some fonts that some site says that 96% of Linux installs should have, and default to "serif", so see how that looks. OSX/iPhone should look good.

Looks fine now, thanks.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2012 02:52

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

thepopstalinist posted:

The InXile forums are kind of a shitshow in general (if there's one thing that makes me nervous about Brian Fargo is that he goes whole hog for ideas even when they suck, eg listening to online forums), but the "which engine do we use?" thread seems to be 99% programmer nerds having earnest debates over what the team's best options are.

Apparently they've decided that W2's engine has to have native Linux support (as opposed to WINE dependence or whatever) and Fargo himself has hinted at a need for visual scripting, which is causing some consternation as apparently that narrows down their options to a small handful (2-3).

Wait, "visual scripting" as in boxes-and-arrows, Labview/Mindstorms-style programming? :wtc:

# ¿ Apr 21, 2012 16:59

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 21:43

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

CuddleChunks posted:

I dunno, this visual scripting stuff seems pretty easy. Now I just need a "add hot babes" function and a "oh god this irradiated mutant is eating my face" operator and I'll be set.

Oh, it's super easy.

At first.

The you want to do something - typically some form of flow control - that the VS environment doesn't support. So now you have to drop into written code anyways to implement it - or sit on your hands while you wait for the VS developer to implement the feature you need. (Hope you worded it unambiguously enough - and have a complete enough understanding of your own requirements - that you actually get the feature you requested!) If this happens frequently enough it often transpires that it would have been much faster for everyone on the team to spend an afternoon learning Lua in the first place.

Of course, if you don't want to do either of these, you can embark in a huge, convoluted workaround to get the behaviour you need, charging headlong into the other problem with VS, which is that even a system with a moderate level of complexity is completely incomprehensible and unmaintainable. And often uses several screens of boxes and arrows to express what would be ten lines of HLL.

I'm not convinced that either of these are inherent limitations of visual scripting as a concept, but as it is I'm aware of no VS implementation that escapes them.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2012 18:22

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