aGTW Update: Nobby the Aardvark, X-Fighter CD32 and Lone Wolf: the Mirror of Death

[jhorneman]

Originally Posted by MethodGit

Something confuses me re: Thalion. IIRC, Amiga Power reviewed both X-Fighter and the English version of Ambermoon within the same issue (AP51). If Thalion GmbH had already been defunct for (almost) a year by then, how was the English Ambermoon able to make its way to reviewers, deals done etc? Did this supposedly alternative Thalion obtain the English Ambermoon rights at the time or something?

I don't know anything about X-Fighter, but I can shed a little light on this mystery.

Ambermoon (in German) had been finished and released by late 93. The remaining developers at Thalion GmbH (I was one of them) moved to Blue Byte to start work on Albion.

Thalion as a company continued to exist for quite a while, although I don't know much about what happened to them and I don't think they developed anything.

Tony King wanted to release Ambermoon in English, so we made an arrangement with him. He provided us with localized texts, we integrated it and sent him the master discs, and he then organized the release in the UK.

Hope that clarifies things a little. I'm very glad the game came out in the UK (even though we couldn't support it post release). It was one of the most polished games I've worked on and had quite a few easter eggs, most of which I have forgotten

[jhorneman]

Originally Posted by MethodGit

You know, I always wondered why Ambermoon looked so familiar in parts to Albion (which I played lots in the past), haha. I take it it pretty much started off as a Thalion project before BlueByte got involved (and used the same engine programmers)?

No, it didn't actually. But we decided to use the same tools as we used for the Amber series, because we wanted to 'quickly get a new game out' (Albion took 2 years to develop).

The engine was rewritten from scratch... twice. I started writing it in 68K assembler, just like the Amber games. 6 months in Commodore went bust and we decided to switch to PC and C. So I had to start again.

Albion's 3D engine was written by an external programmer and was completely different from the one in Ambermoon, which was written by Michael Bittner (who didn't join us at Blue Byte). The Ambermoon engine was an incredible feat. I first saw it running in early January 1991 (!) on an Atari ST.

[dlfrsilver]

Hello jurie, i am actually translating the gam e in french ; to say the least, it renders great when the text is shown in moliere's

I am correcting errors when i find them ; i have reverse engineered the text files with all te offsets and posiions inside them

[alexh]

Originally Posted by jhorneman

Tony King wanted to release Ambermoon in English, so we made an arrangement with him. He provided us with localized texts, we integrated it and sent him the master discs, and he then organized the release in the UK.

It never made it to commercial release. Erik Simon sent me the copy of the English version of Ambermoon he had in 1998 and I leaked it to the world through the Thalion webshrine. Not sure why it never made it. Perhaps due to the minor txt bugs that were subsequently discovered by us Thalion fans?

I loved Amberstar, it was one of the greatest story driven games I ever played. Ambermoon came slightly too late to grab me quite as much but I still loved it.

I look forward to seeing you again at STNICC2k15

[jhorneman]

Originally Posted by alexh

It never made it to commercial release. Eric Simon sent me the copy of the English version of Ambermoon he had in 1998 and I leaked it to the world through the Thalion webshrine. Not sure why it never made it. Perhaps due to the minor txt bugs that were subsequently discovered by us Thalion fans?

I loved Amberstar, it was one of the greatest story driven games I ever played. Ambermoon came slightly too late to grab me quite as much but I still loved it.

I look forward to seeing you again at STNICC2k15

('Erik' with a 'k'. He will punish you if he finds out )

Actually, Thalion UK was... shaky... in 1994. They may not have had the funds to bring it to market.

Re text bugs: sorry. I strongly doubt the game went through QA. I don't even think we released an update for the German version (which did go through QA).

And yeah, STNICC2K15! And/or another Thalion reunion maybe.

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Hello jurie, i am actually translating the gam e in french ; to say the least, it renders great when the text is shown in moliere's

I am correcting errors when i find them ; i have reverse engineered the text files with all te offsets and posiions inside them

Je suis désolé! I have forgotten everything about the formats, although I doubt they were very complicated. Bonne chance.