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Skyrim rendered in text

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Re: Skyrim rendered in text

#81

Post by StavrosK »

shakna wrote: post #79
StavrosK wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm yeah, now it's complaining about libm.so.5 missing...

That should be part of libc 5.3, which would be hell to install side-by-side whichever version you currently have. Not a rabbit-hole to go down lightly. Maybe an old (2011-ish) Linux distro in a VM would be the way to go. If you want the effort. (I obviously don't feel like pursuing it myself).

Hmm, unfortunately I don't have the time right now, as I have to go. I'll leave my computer on, though, so if someone wants to help out, you can access it through tmate at https://tmate.io/t/f9Z36rpEkS8CSsHxwpZGlAl1d.

The few files I have are on a dir on my desktop, the superuser password is passw0rd. Thanks!

Re: Skyrim rendered in text

#82

Post by smnscu »

Mizza wrote: post #64

The game itself is here: https://egamebook.com/vermin/v/latest/ I just played a round while I was on the train - it's _really_ good! Not only the play, but even the presentation of "loading" the next part of the game below the current text, as if it were any other book, is perfect for playing on mobile. I think this could really open up a whole new genre. Personally, I'd love to have a variant of this that I could in…

Just going through the game and I really enjoy it! This is absolutely my cup of tea, despite not being much into D&D. This guy curates an amazing set of playlists for D&D backgrounds, I had fun syncing them with what was happening in the game: https://open.spotify.com/user/bezoing

edit: finished moments after writing the comment. I want more of this! Do you mind setting up a mailing list if you don't have one?

SPOILERS

Thanks for playing Insignificant Little Vermin. You took Orcthorn but didn't destroy the iron monster. You are leaving Mount Bloodrock with swords, spears and no shield. You are seriously injured and exhausted. Briana is wounded. The important thing, though, is that you survived. Congratulations!

Re: Skyrim rendered in text

#83

Post by sdfin »

PostOnce wrote: post #13
jamesrcole wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven't played computer games for so long, mostly because they are just all the same, 3D action and no substance If that's your opinion of them then I don't think you've investigated them much, and are just jumping to conclusions.

I still play all the time and there's some truth to them all being the same. They get more and more polished on a UI level, and more realistic looking, but remain static mechanically. For example, Skyrim doesn't do much mechanically that Ultima Underworld didn't. Ultima proper did all of that from a different perspective for a long while before that, too. The Witcher 3 is my absolute favorite RPG at least since Skyri…

> it doesn't do much that's really new, that I haven't seen before in an RPG or other game.

You might like the game Prey. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(2017_video_game) It does a few new things. Not too much, but has some original ideas. And the sci-fi story is quite good.

Re: Skyrim rendered in text

#84

Post by mrec »

filiph wrote: post #67
mrec wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once I grokked where you were going with this article, my first thought was the awesome King of Dragon Pass [1]. Technically it looks very simple; I'm not sure whether it was implemented as a webpage, but it definitely could be. Where it succeeds better than any other RPG I've ever encountered is in forcing you to roleplay as a bronze age tribal chieftain, because "act according to the worldview and ethics of a 21st-…

I love King of Dragon Pass! It was definitely an inspiration (although I found out about it only after I set out to build this whole thing) and at one point I wanted my game to be basically a king/lineage simulator with options to "zoom in". Later I figured that what works better is to have a "Conan the Barbarian / Elric / Fafhrd+Mouser simulator" that can "zoom out" to higher levels. The problem with kingdoms is tha…

> The problem with kingdoms is that spacial relations matter _a lot_, and so that's not something you want to base your gameplay on with a text game.

You're rekindling my enthusiasm for this sort of thing (I gave up on Sorcery! about halfway through Book 4 when it took rewind away, and Sunless Sea after carelessly dying 20+ hours in on ironman), but I don't think I'm as focussed on just-the-text as you.

The main appeal for me is the scope for extreme fluidity of scale and timestep, and that's perfectly compatible with maps and other informational graphics. I've played way too many CRPGs where you spend 75% of your time just trudging from A to B and back without making any decisions at all.

Re: Skyrim rendered in text

#85

Post by Zarathruster »

mrec wrote: post #57
filiph wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. I played Wizardry games in the 1990s. How is the combat system in Wizardry similar to what I'm arriving at with the "fractal stories" concept? I actually brought up a Wizardry 7 gameplay video just to make sure I'm not remembering it wrong, and here's the text: JOE CASTS ENERGY BLAST RAVEN HIT! RAVEN DIES! Not what I'm going for at all. This looks more like the "Try #5" (D&D-style actions). If what you m…

Once I grokked where you were going with this article, my first thought was the awesome King of Dragon Pass [1]. Technically it looks very simple; I'm not sure whether it was implemented as a webpage, but it definitely could be. Where it succeeds better than any other RPG I've ever encountered is in forcing you to roleplay as a bronze age tribal chieftain, because "act according to the worldview and ethics of a 21st-…

King of Dragon Pass has a lot of problems as a game, but as a roleplaying experience (where 'role' doesn't just mean 'tank' or 'ranged DPS' or such) it really has no equal, IMO. What I find fascinating is that the challenge, which is to play a very specific role (what are the expectations of my tribe/patron deity), is far more interesting than what we get in more open "play however you want!" games.

Re: Skyrim rendered in text

#86

Post by phlakaton »

filiph wrote: post #48
le-mark wrote: post #6

And during that project, I realized that text stories are fractal. Unlinke in videogames (which need a steady update method), in text we don’t actually need to stick to a single level of abstraction. Very cool, this is one of the most original things I've read about this year. The example he gives is different levels of commands and details during combat. Zelda 2 (I think) had a similar thing going from map view to s…

Thanks! Author here. I think quite a few videogames have different levels. For example, I remember an old 1990s game called Wargasm where you could both be the general and the soldier. It was a lot of fun. Most videogames don't go there, though, because it's more straightforward to use the game at a single "level". Even if they do have multiple levels, though, I don't think they ever go with more than 2 or 3. That wo…

I think it's relatively common to the RPG genre to have multiple levels going on in a game. Minigames are a hallowed feature of most Final Fantasy installments, for example. Crafting might also be considered somewhat of a game.

_Fractal_ design, though, implies some element of self-similarity between the levels – and that definitely seems like something more rare!

Re: Skyrim rendered in text

#87

Post by khedoros1 »

Something1234 wrote: post #40
stickydink wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That second link seems to download just fine, shouldn't be hard to get it running again? :)

Report back with your findings please if you try, please?

I downloaded the Shareware game files and used DosBox to extract them (archive.org had them compressed in a DOS version of the game). I found a copy of sdlquake and had to do some minor modifications to get it compiling and assembling on a 64-bit host. Also something about a null pointer dereference in connection with finding the local hostname.

Compiled a copy of SDL with aalib support. Copied it into the game directory, along with the sdlquake binary.

Ran "DISPLAY="" LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. SDL_VIDEODRIVER=aalib ./sdlquake".

That gave me quake in text mode, and would also run in a regular terminal.

Re: Skyrim rendered in text

#88

Post by khedoros1 »

Something1234 wrote: post #75
StavrosK wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to run it, but it's looking for a Quake executable called "squake", which I don't have and didn't manage to find.

Could you rename your quake executable to that?

I think that the original squake was written against svgalib. So the ttyquake package contains a libvga that's probably a shim, translating the output to aalib.

Most Quake ports use OpenGL, SDL, etc for graphics, and won't work directly with the ttyquake files. Which is why I described using sdlquake to achieve the same effect, in my other comment.

Re: Skyrim rendered in text

#89

Post by kbenson »

Mizza wrote: post #64

The game itself is here: https://egamebook.com/vermin/v/latest/ I just played a round while I was on the train - it's _really_ good! Not only the play, but even the presentation of "loading" the next part of the game below the current text, as if it were any other book, is perfect for playing on mobile. I think this could really open up a whole new genre. Personally, I'd love to have a variant of this that I could in…

It sounds like what you are looking for is something like Steve Jackon's Sorcery series, but adapted for a computer. If so, you're in luck! It's available for Android[1] and iOS[2]. If you do like it, there's a few sequels as well.

Edit: I see StavrosK beat me to it by a few hours...

1: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inkle.sorc...

2: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sorcery/id627879091?mt=8

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