|
 In this video, Geoffroi and Henri engage with the seedy underworld in Le Mans in order to track down the Highwayman. Things start to go their way, for a short time at least... We're fairly close to the end now as it's looking like it's only going to be two or three updates until the game is over. I'm always on the lookout for interesting and obscure adventure games and have been picking a few up here and there. I'm most likely going to do an LP of Kingdom O' Magic next. I've lost confidence in attempting an LP of Lula 3D right now, I haven't ruled it out just yet. I did say that I was going to do a couple of old Star Trek action-adventure games so they may be coming up in the near future, I may fit a couple of short adventure games between both of them though.
|
#
?
Jun 17, 2022 23:45
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 00:35 |
|
|
I mentioned it previously, but I remember The Gene Machine being a fun late 90s point and click which is very much inspired by Jules Verne. The only time I saw I here was an abandoned attempt, and there’s nothing on the LP archive for it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 17, 2022 23:54
|
|
|
Zaroff posted:I mentioned it previously, but I remember The Gene Machine being a fun late 90s point and click which is very much inspired by Jules Verne. I noticed the comparison that you made before, I've heard of the game before but have never played it. I'm getting ahold of a copy now as it sounds interesting as I'm a sucker for Victorian romanticization. I'll add it to the list but I can't make any firm commitments about when it will happen.
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2022 00:15
|
|
|
I am seriously disappointed there are no absurdly long cart races in Le Mans.
anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 12:45 on Jun 18, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2022 12:42
|
|
|
 In this video, Geoffroi & Henri speak to the chancellor, then they briefly become undercover agents and then Geoffroi steals some of Juliette's undergarments. I believe that this game will be finished in the next update, I haven't completed a test run yet but there seems to be enough content for one more video. I've just noticed that the guide that I'm using was written by someone who lives in Guernsey  anilEhilated posted:I am seriously disappointed there are no absurdly long cart races in Le Mans. That was the first thing that I thought of but I had no idea how they'd work it in. I'm going to assume that the talk of the "cart factory" was a reference to it?
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2022 23:26
|
|
|
Woof, that wax-knife-key puzzle. That's taking the mickey proper, like.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2022 05:55
|
|
|
Samovar posted:Woof, that wax-knife-key puzzle. I could understand the logic of using the wax to make a mould but not with using it to unlock the huge, rusty iron lock.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2022 08:51
|
|
|
I think the original plan with the key puzzle probably made sense, in the sense that you had the wax impression and you filed down your dagger to turn it into the key.. except the graphics for it show extra metal on the dagger as a result, somehow. I think this was one spot where I got locked out of completing the game, maybe because I'd put the wax on my dagger before I needed to use it for cutting the boat loose and it no longer let me do that? Also I appreciated that the way Geoffroi pretended to be English was to speak slower and louder, and to talk about the weather.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2022 09:00
|
|
|
Red Mike posted:I think the original plan with the key puzzle probably made sense, in the sense that you had the wax impression and you filed down your dagger to turn it into the key.. except the graphics for it show extra metal on the dagger as a result, somehow. I think this was one spot where I got locked out of completing the game, maybe because I'd put the wax on my dagger before I needed to use it for cutting the boat loose and it no longer let me do that? I've just gone back in to check this out and you can't cut the moorings with the waxy knife, but you should still have the sword in your inventory at this point and that does cut the moorings. Apparently, there's a bug with one of the puzzles if you leave the Rouen cathedral too early.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2022 09:31
|
|
|
Rocket Baby Dolls posted:I've just gone back in to check this out and you can't cut the moorings with the waxy knife, but you should still have the sword in your inventory at this point and that does cut the moorings. Apparently, there's a bug with one of the puzzles if you leave the Rouen cathedral too early. I think I'd also lost the sword at that point because of the bug around moving items from Henri to yourself, and that most likely it happened very early on when you're forced to grab an item from Henri. The walkthrough I was following at the time was a bit confusing, especially because it used "the sword" to mean both the dagger and the rapier.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2022 10:03
|
|
|
Red Mike posted:I think I'd also lost the sword at that point because of the bug around moving items from Henri to yourself, and that most likely it happened very early on when you're forced to grab an item from Henri. The walkthrough I was following at the time was a bit confusing, especially because it used "the sword" to mean both the dagger and the rapier. I forgot about the inventory bug. I haven't experienced it yet, thankfully, but the walkthroughs that I find recently have been pretty good at keeping things to the absolute minimum.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2022 10:50
|
|
|
I might have missed it, but is there an in-game reason that both Geoffroi and Henri have separate inventories? Given the bugs attached to them it seems needlessly convoluted!
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2022 13:51
|
|
|
Zaroff posted:I might have missed it, but is there an in-game reason that both Geoffroi and Henri have separate inventories? Given the bugs attached to them it seems needlessly convoluted! If there is one I also missed it. I have absolutely no idea why a two inventory system was developed. There are a couple of puzzles were Henri picks up inventory we've dropped for some reason but I don't know why he couldn't automatically hand them back to us. There's also the monastery disguise, but once it's done there's no reason to keep the clothes anymore. There's also William de Peuples body which, as far as I know, doesn't serve any actual purpose apart from inventory space. If you don't pick the body up it just remains there for the rest of the game.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2022 15:43
|
|
|
The fact that they went as far as to add different backgrounds to the inventory, along with the initial setup for having a currency counter (presumably one that is separate for the two, as well), makes me think there were puzzles/sections that were dropped where you controlled Henri instead. The monastery had the perfect setup for exactly that, with you sending Henri off to pretend to be a monk; in fact he ends up keeping the items for that disguise in his inventory. Day of the Tentacle being released two years before this game was released also makes me think that they initially took inspiration from the multiple character aspect of it but probably had to cut all of that for time/effort. I think we've seen a few places already where there's obvious last-minute invisible walls to stop you going somewhere because they couldn't get the location into the release. In the last episode even, the outdoors of Le Havre seems like this to me, especially with the 'oh this tunnel conveniently led to the inn' lampshade. e: In fact, I realised that ScummVM is open-source so I quickly went and found the Touche engine to see how some things are set up. I haven't dug too deep but some of the things are illuminating: Giving items to another character is in fact explicitly coded in as a special feature so clearly this was meant to be done reasonably often. The game is apparently split into episodes (in a way that isn't clear from a skim, but it looks like it functions like event flags to trigger various updates of the areas). I believe the number of controllable/key characters available is actually kept generic (apparently maxes out at 32) but it's not clear to me if this includes (some? all?) NPCs as well and that's how they do some of the things (e.g. the walking NPCs). Rooms and characters each run their own scripts which means the game engine is actually really a reasonably un-specialised game engine, which is not what I expected for a one-off game that isn't part of a series or based off of old game code. There's functions for things like "wait for character to reach a bounding box" which explains some of the bugs I've seen that were a hard lock of the game (because something mis-fired and the character never arrived). I'm kind of wondering what it would take to try to set up a new game in the same engine, I can't imagine it'd be too hard with the ScummVM code as an explanation for the asset files. A lot of assumptions would need figuring out though (like how the game starts on episode 90, and there's tons of special cases to solve bugs). Red Mike fucked around with this message at 17:22 on Jun 20, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2022 16:59
|
|
|
It definitely seems like the game had a bigger scope originally. It was a small team with a big publisher so there are a number of potential reasons why they reduced the scope of the game. There are game testers in the credits but the game was still pushed out with some major bugs. How easy would it be to remake the game? Would it be something that you would undertake? There's a number of people on GOG who still have an interest in the original game being released so I'm sure there would be interest in it getting some form of release.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2022 19:47
|
|
|
Remaking the game is basically what the ScummVM engine is: it's a complete reimplementation of the engine from scratch in C++. It even fixed a number of bugs originally present, and I think it accepts any other fixes people might want to contribute, although I don't know their policy on extending the engine. Even if they allowed it, I'm not sure there's much benefit because of the limitations of the way it's set up (tying things to CPU cycles to some extent, the animation code being a mess, a set of global flags configuring some of the core functionality); at that point you might as well use another engine. If you're talking about trying to do a 'restore deleted scenes/functionality/etc' type deal, I don't think any of the releases included resources that weren't in the final game because of how strict the storage limitations were. Of course as I was saying that I got curious and opened up the .DAT file and had a poke about and an insane amount of the 25MB file seems to be duplicated item descriptions, so maybe there are some unused assets or the like. I'd have to write up some tooling to load the file properly and then display it in a useful way (which would also involve reading the room data, the pallette data, etc, so not a quick thing). Now that I think about it, if I were to write this up and wire up my own tiny 'game' on the engine, I'd really want to set up a few Princess Bride set pieces with dialogue from the movie, it would be a perfect fit. e: Oh and unfortunately the entire game is fixed resolution and the assets are fixed resolution, I don't think higher resolution assets were ever published/shared, so anything like remastering it would be out of the question. Which is a shame considering the backgrounds were watercolour scanned in, they'd probably look amazing at high resolution.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2022 22:24
|
|
|
I'm really easy to trick into doing work apparently. Spent some time and wired up some tooling to at least extract some data out of the .DAT file. I'm not going to share the entire set of assets, especially because there's some spoilers, but here's some highlights: This is the room image for the first room (ID 1). The various bits scattered throughout are areas that get clipped out and pasted on top of particular locations based on the scripts that run (in a room or in response to player actions).  This is the sprite sheet for the first sprite (ID 0 of course, because why be consistent). This is nowhere near the only sheet used for the main character, and doesn't include a load of actions we've already seen him do. If the colours seem off on both of those, that's because there's a number of things that can impact the palette: the room you're in dictates the specific palette it uses (which can tint your sprite to show night time, but also fade in/out, but also overlay, but also even some sort of random tinting that happens on a timer), and there's maths around that can shift how the palette actually gets used. I've tried to make sense of it to make the exports line up, but too much of it depends on the scripts having set data to particular values.  Speaking of scripts, this is an example of one. This script is the 'start-up' script that runs when you start a new game. I had to go through and map out what each opcode really does as well as correctly read the right number of parameters for each, otherwise the program makes no sense. For those familiar, yes this is basically bytecode for a custom VM where the instruction set includes both things like 'Jump if not equal' and 'Move STK backwards and decrement its value', but also things like 'Queue up a move for this character' and 'Start playing music'. As far as I can tell the vast majority of scripts are really simple and don't use any complex logic except to short-circuit paths when some events have been finished already. Unfortunately, there is no real deleted content that I can see, not even any real easter eggs. The storage requirements were probably tight enough that they couldn't afford anything even if they wanted to. On the other hand, the things that I've enjoyed finding out so far: 1. It looks like multiple characters was definitely a focus of the engine with up to 32 characters being effectively usable per room (each with their own inventory, etc). 2. Money is special cased throughout the codebase as an inventory item with a numeric value, and there's a lot of input logic that went into the ability to grab silver/gold coins correctly from your pouch, etc. 3. It's very obvious that the inventory transfer mechanic is brittle and there's no way around that without fixing how the update cycle works (and how difficult it is to sync up some actions). 4. The palette shifting/fades/etc all make me think that at some point there was the intention to either have a time of day mechanic or something along the lines; there's so much effort put into this and as far as I can tell it's only ever used at the start of the game to 'fade in' the intro and potentially at the end of the game. It's not too much more work on top of what I've done to build a high-level scripting language that compiles down to this bytecode, so yes other than various assumptions (inventory items that must exist at particular IDs, workarounds for bugs in particular rooms, etc) it's definitely possible to write a "new" game on top, with all new assets/logic. I don't know that I'll take it that far though, but if I clean up this tooling a bit I'll probably throw it up on Github.
|
|
#
?
Jun 22, 2022 09:34
|
|
|
You're doing God's work here.
|
|
#
?
Jun 22, 2022 09:39
|
|
|
That's really impressive work, thank you for sharing. I'm getting ready to prepare and upload the final video now so feel free to share any further findings. There was a bit at the start of the next update which made me remember the money pouch, we haven't had anything in it since the start of the game. It's definitely a mechanic that was not used at all after finding the franc in to use to purchase the souvenir.
|
|
#
?
Jun 22, 2022 10:01
|
|
|
Dang yo, that's thorough.
|
|
#
?
Jun 22, 2022 12:12
|
|
|
 This is the final video of this LP. Geoffroi & Henri find a way to reach the castle, they just need to find a way to storm it, save Juliette, stop the Cardinal and stay alive throughout. Thank you, everyone, for being a part of this LP. This has been a surprisingly good experience, I've enjoyed the writing and the humour. I appreciate that people have gone out of their way to tell me more about the development of the game, something that makes the game even more extraordinary. Please keep us updated with your progress, Red Mike. I've been trying to work on starting a Kingdom O' Magic LP and it's going to be a bit of a peculiar one to attempt. It's a really bizarre, sometimes delving into the surreal, fantasy adventure game.
|
|
#
?
Jun 22, 2022 15:58
|
|
|
Thank you very much for the LP! Obviously there was a lot of love put into this game and it's too bad it didn't see a wider release. After all this time, I guess they can now bury the poor guy's body after carrying it around the width and breadth of France.
|
|
#
?
Jun 22, 2022 18:02
|
|
|
That was pleasantly silly. A shame it wasn't better known.
|
|
#
?
Jun 22, 2022 20:24
|
|
|
That was a clearly rushed ending, but hey at least it still fits the british sitcom narrative right up until the final line. Thanks for the LP, delivered some needed nostalgia for me. If anyone's interested and programming-minded, I've pushed up a draft version of the repository now here, although only for viewing some of the assets and assuming you have the TOUCHE.DAT file to use which I won't be including myself for obvious reasons. I set up a web frontend for it and fixed some of the major issues which means the sprite sheets and room images now render in correct colour. I'm planning to run a publicly-accessible version of latest once I set it up on a droplet, but I think I'll have to tweak the image rendering to make it work so it might be a few days. But it should look something like this (click for more images):  I'll probably keep working on it for a little while, my goal would be to get enough of the data parsed that I can turn it around and just output a very bare-bones new DAT file with a sprite/room/basic script that can technically be loaded into the game successfully.
|
|
#
?
Jun 22, 2022 22:46
|
|
|
You know, now that it's been mentioned, the VA for Geoffroi does sound quite a bit like Eric Idle. I was wondering about the scope reduction thing, although it is in the spirit of adventure games to have no money throughout most of the game and have to barter/steal/improvise everything instead of just buying it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2022 11:50
|
|
|
I'm rarely on SA nowadays so wasn't here when it was running. L just wanted to say thank you for another great LP!
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2022 08:42
|
|
|
Just to wrap up and say a thank you (and a drat you) for getting my head stuck on this project for a couple weeks, I've now achieved the goal I set out to initially: https://i.imgur.com/wXhXPoa.gifv This is running in the actual Touche engine, just by replacing the TOUCHE.DAT file with a new one. In fact, here's a link to my custom one. All it sets up is the background (a modified screenshot from the Princess Bride movie), the two sprites with their stock animations (from the original game for convenience), a couple points for positioning and the strings, and then a program that just makes the sprites act it out about as far as the GIF shows. Honestly even for this little I'm surprised at how little it really took to wire it up, the game engine is honestly not bad. If anything lets it down, it's the animation system being very clearly a last-minute bodge. The only big outstanding thing I haven't touched is the conversation system, but from a skim it just looks like more of the same, so it's just a matter of working out the right patterns for things. Obviously there's no actual gameplay yet, but that's mostly because putting all the right data in (hitboxes, areas, walk routes, etc) is a lot of manual work at this stage; writing tooling to do it automatically will honestly be less work, but I don't know that I'll take it that far. At the very least I'll clean up what I have and push it up into the repository in the next few days. So thanks for the nostalgia trip with the LP and then the two weeks of productive procrastination!
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2022 22:43
|
|
|
Red Mike posted:Just to wrap up and say a thank you (and a drat you) for getting my head stuck on this project for a couple weeks, I've now achieved the goal I set out to initially: Thank you for all of your hard work! I'll give the DAT a test run in the morning.
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2022 23:05
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 00:35 |
|
|
Red Mike posted:Just to wrap up and say a thank you (and a drat you) for getting my head stuck on this project for a couple weeks, I've now achieved the goal I set out to initially: Holy-!
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2022 07:33
|
|