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UnnamedCourier · 09 December 2021, 13:10

Ahh, that's cool, I hadn't looked into how those messages worked. I know they are pretty sparsely used in the actual game. The Penitentiary map and a few campaign maps use them, but it's very rare.
It's also quite weird, the early files for the game show it was intended to be VERY narrative led with a fair amount of dialogue, but I guess this was abandoned as it doesn't really suit the actual game. I recently redid the Document library page and included the contents of all the text files, and this has all the early dialogue. It's just kind of weird they made something quite different to what this showed, and that they were still talking about the original hostages version of the plot quite late but had already made something totally different (the staffmaps file I posted here previously says all the campaign maps were done by the end of April 1993, so were they going to do a second pass to add in dialogue, or was that idea of the game already long since dead?).

I should really work out what maps actually use dialogue, I got excited because the odd Traveller's Rest map (22) has a dialogue file, but it's actually just a generic one that a few levels have that is not even used in the end.

I think as well the whole random characters saying the same lines thing really kills narrative as you can't give your characters any actual character. It's literally impossible to flesh out individuals that way. The generic lines in game that made it are kind of lame and annoying as they're so generic and repetitive. The planned lines in the development files are also quite dopey and uninteresting apart from when they're referencing lore stuff. It's odd, I actually really like the setting and characters as depicted in the manual/novela, but the dialogue in-game is mostly terrible! It's telling that the MS-DOS version of the game completely rips out all of the dialogue.

I didn't think about the HGViewer needing compressed maps. That's just a really silly oversight, I would have thought the main reason you would use it would be because you are working on an unfinished map and want to see what it looks like from another perspective...

09 December 2021, 13:10	#189
UnnamedCourier Registered User Join Date: Jul 2020 Location: UK Posts: 76	Ahh, that's cool, I hadn't looked into how those messages worked. I know they are pretty sparsely used in the actual game. The Penitentiary map and a few campaign maps use them, but it's very rare. It's also quite weird, the early files for the game show it was intended to be VERY narrative led with a fair amount of dialogue, but I guess this was abandoned as it doesn't really suit the actual game. I recently redid the Document library page and included the contents of all the text files, and this has all the early dialogue. It's just kind of weird they made something quite different to what this showed, and that they were still talking about the original hostages version of the plot quite late but had already made something totally different (the staffmaps file I posted here previously says all the campaign maps were done by the end of April 1993, so were they going to do a second pass to add in dialogue, or was that idea of the game already long since dead?). I should really work out what maps actually use dialogue, I got excited because the odd Traveller's Rest map (22) has a dialogue file, but it's actually just a generic one that a few levels have that is not even used in the end. I think as well the whole random characters saying the same lines thing really kills narrative as you can't give your characters any actual character. It's literally impossible to flesh out individuals that way. The generic lines in game that made it are kind of lame and annoying as they're so generic and repetitive. The planned lines in the development files are also quite dopey and uninteresting apart from when they're referencing lore stuff. It's odd, I actually really like the setting and characters as depicted in the manual/novela, but the dialogue in-game is mostly terrible! It's telling that the MS-DOS version of the game completely rips out all of the dialogue. I didn't think about the HGViewer needing compressed maps. That's just a really silly oversight, I would have thought the main reason you would use it would be because you are working on an unfinished map and want to see what it looks like from another perspective...