|
Boldor posted:Oh, the entire concept of multiplayer games is another matter entirely. I do like trying to remember the kinds of gaming arguments we had decades ago, though usually they only come to mind when someone makes a claim about some new thing being the "first [whatever]" and my pedantry senses start tingling, forcing me to scream out the window WELL ACTUALLY Caverns of Freitag was first [whatever]!!! Also Master of Orion II rules so hard that I still copy the directory from computer to computer, even if I rarely play for much longer than it takes to absorb the music and atmosphere and laugh about tech trees Also for as much as I want to read what you have to say about the early Civilization games I also do not want to lose you from the thread for four more years
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2020 01:24
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 03:36 |
|
|
Boldor posted:This despite things like MUDs having existed for years, To be fair, MUDs suck rear end.
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2020 13:52
|
|
|
Dr. Quarex posted:Also Master of Orion II rules so hard that I still copy the directory from computer to computer, even if I rarely play for much longer than it takes to absorb the music and atmosphere and laugh about tech trees
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2020 16:24
|
|
|
Before I started this project, I thought Phantasie was a smooth, solidly programmed game. The moment I took a shovel to dig deep, though, bugs are seemingly everywhere. (That, incidentally, should not dissuade you from playing it. It's a simple, quick RPG that I believe is no less good for being so easy compared to almost any other classic RPG. The only thing to warn about is that starting statistics are just that important.) I'm now sure this will happen to any classic computer game I decide to analyze deeply. (At this point, what I've written for Wizardry 6 seems shallow!) There are going to be "everyone else is wrong" moments as a result for anything people care about ... which will happen whenever I tackle the Civilization games. Not doing that now, because I'm more comfortable at the moment analyzing the simpler instruction set of the original IBM PC. Now, you may think that so many problems indicate something wrong with the industry, then or now. I disagree. Here are some counterarguments.
Angband in v2.7.something (I think between .4 and .8) introduced a simplification to paralysis, as part of code cleanup. There had previously been specialized logic to prevent paralysis duration from getting extended much if you were already paralyzed. That disappeared ... and for the sake of simpler code, it suddenly got a lot easier to be stunlocked and killed. This is why people emphasized getting free action so much more heavily in that era (free action protects against paralysis). I tried to argue against it, but I should have tried harder. That finally got fixed in v3.1.2 (2010). v2.7.4-2.7.8 came out in 1995, so that had existed for 15 years. Nethack in v3.1.0 (1993) introduced the Riders, which had some cool new deadly attacks. These were added to the already-existing attacks of the demon lords. And one of those suddenly gained a deadly touch attack, intended for the rider Death. It was a clear bug with a trivial fix, but it nonetheless went unfixed until v3.4.0 (2002). Yup, it took nearly a decade to detect and fix a bug ... that anyone who studied basic programming could probably find and fix in a few minutes. Both of these flaws could easily kill you outright after 20+ hours of play, too.
That doesn't even get into shenanigans such as "we forgot to prohibit promotion to the opposite color" and "let's adjust the 50-move rule, again". Let's go for an even longer scale here:
And I spent most of today at work fixing a serious bug in stable code, caused by another long-standing bug being fixed ... yeah.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2020 07:30
|
|
|
Halloween Jack posted:I was really really into MoO for awhile. I remember disliking the changes in MoO II, but I don't remember the specifics. MoO is probably the most evil game I've ever played, even moreso than Floor 13. You might be interested in a modern remake of the original MoO (still in beta, mind) 
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2020 14:04
|
|
|
Boldor posted:There was enormous skepticism at the time whether it was viable or not. This despite things like MUDs having existed for years, and the then-recent incredible success of Warcraft II thanks to its robust multiplayer. (And other games too -- I still play Master of Orion II multiplayer. Yes, that community is still around even, though these days I'm more a member of the original Master of Orion community.) This alone blows my mind. I played a bajillion games of singleplayer MOO2 when it came out, but didn't hear about multi even back then. I'm amazed people still play it now.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2020 17:48
|
|
|
FYI, GoG has the Eye of the Beholder Trilogy for free for the next 2 days or so.
|
|
#
?
Jun 17, 2020 22:26
|
|
|
Kuros posted:FYI, GoG has the Eye of the Beholder Trilogy for free for the next 2 days or so. thank you! I grabbed it, I've been meaning to try playing that on something other than the SNES. Are there any recommendations for guides/addons/whatever like the Gold Box assistant?
|
|
#
?
Jun 17, 2020 22:55
|
|
|
There's a general D&D sale for those of you wanting to try Dark Sun we were talking about earlier. I should buy TOEE and give it a try again. In theory it seems like such a game I'd like but I've never been able to get out of the first chapter.
|
|
#
?
Jun 17, 2020 23:14
|
|
|
Temple of Elemental Evil is another of those games where crazy modders spent years fixing it, right? I want to say when I mentioned Temple of Elemental Evil played like walking through an abandoned mall felt, someone angrily pointed out that I obviously had not been paying attention to the fan patch scene (which no, I absolutely had not) Also kind of on-brand, Solasta: Crown of the Magister is an out-of-nowhere (for me) 5th Edition D&D project that just released a demo on Steam, and despite not being close to release it has some pretty great polish and gameplay already. Definitely familiar enough for someone like me who just finished Baldur's Gate and Pillars of Eternity playthroughs that it seems worth mentioning.
|
|
#
?
Jun 17, 2020 23:55
|
|
|
Speaking of crazy modding, I played IWD2 at launch and did enjoy it but I remember it had some rough spots and an obvious lack of polish from its rushed release. I know there will never be an EE since they lost the code, but did modders ever go to town on it?
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2020 00:31
|
|
|
Dr. Quarex posted:Temple of Elemental Evil is another of those games where crazy modders spent years fixing it, right? I want to say when I mentioned Temple of Elemental Evil played like walking through an abandoned mall felt, someone angrily pointed out that I obviously had not been paying attention to the fan patch scene (which no, I absolutely had not) I would not recommend playing ToEE *without* the Circle of Eight mod. Not that it's bad vanilla, but Co8 adds so much.
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2020 01:22
|
|
|
JustJeff88 posted:I would not recommend playing ToEE *without* the Circle of Eight mod. Not that it's bad vanilla, but Co8 adds so much. Don’t forget Temple+! It can run on top of Co8 and allows for cooler poo poo like Ultrawide resolutions.
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2020 01:58
|
|
|
Boldor posted:Stuff about Phantasie I'm actually impressed that a game as complex as Phantasie was apparently coded in Apple BASIC? (At least that looks like Apple BASIC) Out of curiosity, how did you get at the source? Every old commercial A2 game in BASIC I haven't been able to get at the source, outside some edge cases like the game crashing and then dumping the list. There are a handful like Crush Crumble and Chomp I know are programmed in BASIC but would really like to poke at the code. Though with only 2-character variable names for everything it's always a chore to figure out what does what.
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2020 04:37
|
|
|
Halloween Jack posted:I was really really into MoO for awhile. I remember disliking the changes in MoO II, but I don't remember the specifics. MoO is probably the most evil game I've ever played, even moreso than Floor 13. For me the big ones were: The move to Civilization-like planet building, which tends to get pretty tedious in even the good games of this time with often not good automation or queue options at all once your empire gets large, when compared to the pared down, simple slider system of first MOO. It's absolutely not all change to worse, but overall I just preferred the elegant system in first game. Of the newer space 4x games I think Sword of the Stars managed to do this aspect pretty similarly. Fleet command points kinda butchered the whole "swarm of small ships or big beaters" -concept of original MOO because there really is no question whether you want five frigates or a titan for the same maintenance cost. More detailed battle system with individual ships, shield arcs, detailed ship designing is great, but I felt that something was also different and lost compared to the more boardgamey, abstracted and slicker combat of first MOO. Tech tree system I felt was just a step back, I just preferred semi-randomness of original tech tree tiers to static tech tiers of MOO2 where you generally had some choices that went for one tech 95% of time. In MOO the minus was you might be screwed for some key tech like Improved Robotic Controls III orIV if you didn't hit it on your tree and couldn't trade or spy for it, but I felt it made for more interesting game overall where you had to adapt a bit all the time. I mean they both are great games and I played them a poo poo ton, but I've always felt there's just a design philosophy difference there that snuck in between the games. Master of Orion still feels a very elegant game with decidedly limited and fast colony management. Already Master of Magic (which I love) couple of years later went more in the way of Civilization. Design wise Master of Orion 2 felt like built in some ways more on that than the first Orion (in some things like the leader system and planet management clearly so).
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2020 05:51
|
|
|
Genpei Turtle posted:I'm actually impressed that a game as complex as Phantasie was apparently coded in Apple BASIC? (At least that looks like Apple BASIC) It is Applesoft BASIC, yeah. All I had to do was open the disk image in CiderPress, open the program files, copy the text to a modern text editor, and off I go! (It's not exclusively in BASIC; there are some routines in 6502 assembler.) Why no one has done this before, I don't know, but it's making the IBM Phantasie easier to interpret. Though by now I know that the way it handles overlays and its usage of floating-point arithmetic are not actually typical. Two-letter variables are still very informative compared to disassembled code, though! I still haven't figured the way floating-point arithmetic works in the IBM version, but I know the specific numbers to look for from both the Apple ][ version and experimentation (and how the two versions differ), so it's only a matter of time. (The random number generator was thankfully easy to identify, and doesn't use floating-point as BASIC.) If you ever try this, it helps to determine as many magic numbers as you can without disassembly. (I can go into tremendous detail if anyone actually wants the technical detail.)
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2020 09:07
|
|
|
Dr. Quarex posted:
Yeah I really liked that. Definitely worth checking the demo out.
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2020 11:27
|
|
|
IIRC Master of Orion II was originally titled Master of Antares in development so it wasn't intended to be a sequel. It's a shame that most post-90's 4x games took inspiration from MOO2 rather than the first one. MOO1 is just well designed and lean. It's a 4x game that's pick-up-and-play rather than feeling like being committed to a 20-plus hour game of micromanaging planets.
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2020 13:26
|
|
|
Arivia posted:thank you! I grabbed it, I've been meaning to try playing that on something other than the SNES. Are there any recommendations for guides/addons/whatever like the Gold Box assistant? The All-Seeing Eye is the equivalent of the Gold Box Assistant for the Eye of the Beholder games. Automapping, character editor, and hintbook clues built into the interface if you want. https://ase.zorbus.net/
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2020 15:00
|
|
|
Taborcarn posted:The All-Seeing Eye is the equivalent of the Gold Box Assistant for the Eye of the Beholder games. Automapping, character editor, and hintbook clues built into the interface if you want. thank you very much!
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2020 17:26
|
|
|
Boldor posted:It is Applesoft BASIC, yeah. All I had to do was open the disk image in CiderPress, open the program files, copy the text to a modern text editor, and off I go! (It's not exclusively in BASIC; there are some routines in 6502 assembler.) I never knew about Ciderpress before. I am going to have so much fun with this. Looks like on brief glance that some games use longer-than-3-character variable names! It’s probably just for ease of reading code since everything after the first 2 are ignored but I’ll take it. And yeah I’d definitely be interested in learning more about avoiding disassembly. Programming in BASIC was as far as I got on the Apple and I’m not super excited about learning 6502 ASM.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2020 01:49
|
|
|
Genpei Turtle posted:And yeah I’d definitely be interested in learning more about avoiding disassembly. Programming in BASIC was as far as I got on the Apple and I’m not super excited about learning 6502 ASM. 6502 assembly is generally more useful than 8088/x86 to learn for retrogaming, since so many systems (Apple ][, Atari, Commodore 64, NES) use it. 8088/x86 gaming is what I know best, though, so it's what I'm going to stick to personally. Reverse engineering works differently from forward engineering. It's also easier to do for RPGs than other genres, because most of them show lots of numbers as part of gameplay, and that provides many convenient levers to figure out how things tick. A typical place to start are large in-game numbers such as experience and gold. Convert these to hexadecimal and look for them in either saved games or a memory dump. (You can do a memory dump in DOSBox with the debugger version.) Look for the hex strings both the "right way" and backwards; it's common in my experience for a game to use the opposite endianness of the processor it's on. The little-endian Apple ][ for instance, actually stores experience as big-endian, meaning 1,000,000 experience (0x0F4240 in hex) really is represented as 0F 42 40, not 40 42 0F as normal on an Apple ][ or IBM PC. You can then find this in the Apple Phantasie code: code:You can identify most entries in both a character data structure, and similarly monster data structures, just by knowing how the game works and comparison, or by experimentally changing numbers and seeing how gameplay differs. Typically the next major things to check are statistics (Strength, etc.) and skills, then things like accuracy and armor class. There's also inventory items. This is straight-up printed in the manual for Phantasie (one the reasons I'm analyzing this game), but it's often not hard to discover what's what for other games. You can go in order off any strings you find, or experimentally change inventory items, or sometimes there's an explicit in-game order, or any number of other approaches. Strings and other key data are often encrypted in older games. This is sometimes done simply by XOR-ing each byte with 0x80, which will deter more hackers than you'd think! There will often be a more sophisticated scheme to crack, but everything I've seen so far in retrogaming works on a byte-by-byte basis (as in, an encrypted byte doesn't depend on other encrypted bytes for decryption) and isn't that hard to decrypt. (This only works if you know what and where the data are.) On an IBM PC, older DOS executables are often compressed. It's a crude compression that the utility UNP.EXE will undo for you; if present you want to do that first so all data structures are the correct size. None of this requires any assembly experience, but knowing all the above first helps a lot. Knowing that a character is represented by 282 bytes (0x11A) in the IBM version means that almost any reference to 0x11A means the game is looking up a character. And then it often adds to this number to access a specific statistic -- a subsequent relative reference by 0x08 is then Charisma both in game machine code and in the saved game files.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2020 05:00
|
|
|
Is there a 'Before I Play' trove of knowledge for the Gold Box and Dark Sun games? I'm not familiar with that edition of D&D and want to make sure I don't bone myself on character creation
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2020 22:23
|
|
|
TheHoosier posted:Is there a 'Before I Play' trove of knowledge for the Gold Box and Dark Sun games? I'm not familiar with that edition of D&D and want to make sure I don't bone myself on character creation You kind of can't bone yourself. In 1E/2E, a fighter is a fighter, a cleric is a cleric, and so forth. It's not like later editions where it's all highly customizable for minmaxers with skill levels and feats and whatnot. The only important thing is not to make nonhuman characters without a good reason. Nonhumans can multiclass, but in exchange they have hard level limits for all classes but thieves. For the Krynn Gold Box games that's not the case though, as elves, for example, don't get level limits as clerics and mages.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2020 23:37
|
|
|
Wouldn't you guys agree that GBC is the only way to really play the Gold Box games these days? And if so, TheHoosier maybe consider getting it as I think you can do some nice QoL things like remove the level caps for races that Genpei Turtle just mentioned. I know I got screwed over the first time I played.
|
|
#
?
Jun 22, 2020 07:11
|
|
|
TheHoosier posted:Is there a 'Before I Play' trove of knowledge for the Gold Box and Dark Sun games? I'm not familiar with that edition of D&D and want to make sure I don't bone myself on character creation In Dark Sun, Druids get Raise Dead iirc, not Clerics, which is a doozy of an error I made the first time I played
|
|
#
?
Jun 22, 2020 15:54
|
|
|
BadAstronaut posted:Wouldn't you guys agree that GBC is the only way to really play the Gold Box games these days? And if so, TheHoosier maybe consider getting it as I think you can do some nice QoL things like remove the level caps for races that Genpei Turtle just mentioned. I know I got screwed over the first time I played. I actually mostly play without it -- to me, it's more trouble to set up than it's worth (beyond Pool of Radiance and its lack of Fix command). But that's also because I'm so familiar with the games that many of the features don't help. If you're playing for the first time you should definitely use it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 22, 2020 17:33
|
|
|
Just my opinion, of course, but I am familiar with the games yet I would only play them with GBC. Similarly, I know the EoB games well yet would not play them with All-Seeing Eye or similar for #3.
|
|
#
?
Jun 22, 2020 17:52
|
|
|
I appreciate the info. I plan on using GBC for a first go, just to ease in. I've never played them before so I have no frame of reference.
|
|
#
?
Jun 22, 2020 18:13
|
|
|
With all the revelations coming out, what is the official/unofficial Discord server for this thread? GBC is useful just for (quickly) customizing the look of all your party members so you know who is who at a glance.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2020 18:09
|
|
|
Someone in the Steam thread just set up a Steam channel for general PC game talk on an existing goon discord server, so maybe it's worth trying to get in on that and just make another one? Might be easier to keep in contact with the same people than with something standalone.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2020 18:13
|
|
|
If we do make a retro games in general or old scool CPRG in particular discord, I'd lie an invite please.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2020 18:21
|
|
|
Maybe request a dedicated text-channel in the RetroFPS Discord linked to in the early FPS SA thread https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3420790&pagenumber=2045#lastpost This kind of makes sense. After all, a good portion of retro CRPGs discussed in this thread do have FPS sub-windows ETPC posted:https://discord.gg/BQXS4H3
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2020 18:35
|
|
|
I'm happy to set up an old-school-RPG discussion channel on the official Drop Bear Bytes discord server if people want to go there. I'm not trying to hijack this and I am not trying to break any rules, so if not appropriate/needed/wanted, I'll hold off.
|
|
#
?
Jun 25, 2020 06:41
|
|
|
quantumfoam posted:Maybe request a dedicated text-channel in the RetroFPS Discord linked to in the early FPS SA thread https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3420790&pagenumber=2045#lastpost invite link is expired
|
|
#
?
Jun 25, 2020 12:12
|
|
|
GreenBuckanneer posted:invite link is expired the person deactivated the link however The Kins posted:I've temporarily disabled the Discord invite, partly to avoid potential issues that, honestly, probably wouldn't have cropped up anyway, and partly because I'm pretty sure at some 270 users, everyone who reads this thread is already there anyway. also the Discord channel isn't a part of GoonDiscordNetwork, whatever the hell that is.
|
|
#
?
Jun 25, 2020 12:54
|
|
|
Also, if you are paranoid about losing old posts or good information if the SomethingAwful forums go down or get purged, the following SA Thread scraper tool worked pretty well when I tested it out on this thread and the Wizardry Megathread: P.S. TREBOR SUX thread.Safety Biscuits posted:I copied this from the Fiction Writing thread, I have no idea if it works:
|
|
#
?
Jun 25, 2020 13:48
|
|
|
What if someone doesn't use Chrome?
|
|
#
?
Jun 25, 2020 14:07
|
|
|
Libluini posted:What if someone doesn't use Chrome? Why not download the scraper plugin from github and see if you can rewrite enough of the plugin-code for it work in whatever your primary browser is? Maybe download and install Chrome or Chromium as a one-time usage thing just for that SA thread scrapper tool? Perhaps open a mechanical turk task https://www.mturk.com/ to have someone else do the all SA thread archiving work for you? (this option costs money) Or just do nothing? TheHoosier posted:Is there a 'Before I Play' trove of knowledge for the Gold Box and Dark Sun games? I'm not familiar with that edition of D&D and want to make sure I don't bone myself on character creation Boldor's posts in the very bottom of this thread's OP is all that you need.
|
|
#
?
Jun 25, 2020 15:00
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 03:36 |
|
|
Joe Chill posted:IIRC Master of Orion II was originally titled Master of Antares in development so it wasn't intended to be a sequel. It's a shame that most post-90's 4x games took inspiration from MOO2 rather than the first one. MOO1 is just well designed and lean. It's a 4x game that's pick-up-and-play rather than feeling like being committed to a 20-plus hour game of micromanaging planets. I've been firmly on the side of MOO1 for years ad I'm glad I'm not alone
|
|
#
?
Jun 25, 2020 16:28
|
|
