Quoting: ApopasYeah but videos in NWN weren't playable or supported. There was a third party hack which was using Mplayer to play them.

Yes, nwmovies, like I said in https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/a-developer-on-tesla-effect-details-why-the-linux-port-never-arrived.6325/page=1#49332 :P

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Quoting: Takt's a shame that they don't support Linux any more, because they certainly used to - the between-chapter cutscenes in Neverwinter Nights used Bink.

Back in the days, they didn't support Linux either. That's why the "Movies" button is greyed out in the main menu in the Linux version of NWN. And that's why "nwmovies" exists, which does evil hacks to hook into an SDL call, and then calling an external movie player.

Back in the days, you used Wine and a Windows binary of a Bink tool that extracted the frames and the sound, and then used mencoder to recreate a video out of that. And then you used mplayer called from nwmovies to play it.

Later, they released a BinkPlayer for Linux that could play them. But it was horribly slow. Nowadays, thanks to the ffmpeg people having RE'd Bink1, you can use mplayer to play the Bink movies directly.

On-topic: see also my question in that thread and one of the Tesla Effect devs responding: https://steamcommunity.com/app/261510/discussions/0/558752449447050885/#p4 [External Link] . I tried to poke them a bit to get some details what exactly is the big problem in extending the Unity plugin to also support the, as far as I am aware, existing plain Bink2 libraries for Linux.

The response:

Quoting: CubaseHowever, what I *do* know is: the Bink 2 SDK (at the time in which we were integrating it into Unity) was far from perfect, and we worked closely with multiple RAD developers to iron out the kinks and get it working. From what I remember: it took a few weeks to get it working in Unity, even with a supposed "complete" SDK. In fact, it was some of the guys on our end who discovered a few loopholes and tricks to get it to work. None of those strategies would translate over to Linux, however, and regardless of how much we tried, we needed RADs assistance to get it to work... but by this time, they had already considered our business over.

Which is a bit too vague for my liking, since I like me some details, but I think the general gist is clear. Yes, Bink2 libraries do apparently exist for Linux, but they couldn't it to work together with Unity on Linux (for whatever reason), and RADGameTools didn't help them further (for whatever reason).

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Quoting: hummer010Let's see, they received 8X the funding they were looking for, and with all that extra money, managed to release the end of the game only 30 months late.

...You say that as if an increased budget, and with it an increased scope, means faster developement. That's not how it works.

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Quoting: Half-ShotNo, when your asking for money you PLAN IT WELL

They did. They planned a tiny game, and a documentary around it. Then suddenly, they got tenfold the money they asked for, and the plan went POUF. There's only so much polishing you can do to that tiny planned game, and the backers clearly expected more at that point.

If you have seen the documentary they produced, the planning and budgeting of the $3.3m project then was relatively well done.

Quoting: Half-Shotthey should seek out a publisher because they need the support so they DON'T go overbudget again.

If you look at their crowdfunding now, you will see that they have done exactly that. The $3.3m million they ask for is only a part. Another part will come from their own company, a part from outside investors. And a part from the Fig investors, i.e. people who pledge more than $1000500, who will then get a part of the profit as a return on their investment. This last part, that's where Fig is different from Kickstarter.

The completele budget for Psychonauts 2 is $13.5m.

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I still don't believe it. :P

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Well, I can report that they do indeed have both versions of LSL6. The VGA one runs with ScummVM, the SVGA one with DOSBox. Me, I'm satisfied. :)

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Quoting: JudasIscariotWe have the VGA version of both Larry 1 and 6 as well as the original non-VGA versions

There's a difference here, though:

Larry 1 was originally in EGA, 320x200 with 16 colors. It used Sierra's AGI engine. It was then completely remade a few years later using Sierra's later SCI engine, in VGA, 320x200 with 256 colors. (And then, there was another, Kickstarter'd remake, in 2013.)

Larry 6, however, was originally in VGA, 320x200 with 256 colors, and was enhanced a mere year later with SVGA graphics, 640x480. Both of these versions use SCI.

So in one case, the non-VGA (EGA) version was the original, in the other case, the non-VGA version (SVGA) was the remake.

EDIT: Narf, completely forgot my actual point: this means you have both the VGA and SVGA version of Larry 6, and the EGA and VGA version of Larry 1, right? :)

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Quoting: fleskI didn't realize LSL 6 was supported by ScummVM

Partially. There's a low-res version (which originally ran on DOS) and a high-res version (which original ran on Windows). ScummVM supports only the low-res version, but not the high-res one.

The low-res version was originally released on floppies, and a year later, the CD-ROM release included both versions. I'm not sure which version(s) GOG's release has, though.

You can see screenshots of the different version on MobyGames [External Link].

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Quoting: legluondunetFor the moment none of the game are playable, that's right?

None of them are playable as such, no. They all currently show ingame graphics, and let you fly around in the game world using the WASD keys, similar to the "spectator mode" in an FPS.

Neverwinter Nights also has conversations rigged up. I.e. you can click on an NPC, and you will see a dialogue box. This makes it partially playable, I guess, for a certain definition of playable. The next big step there would be figuring out the walkmeshes, implement some pathfinding on them, and then make the player character walk around when the mouse is clicked on the ground.

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Me, I played this here visual novel: Brilliant Shadows [External Link]. I can recommend it, for what it's worth, if you're into these sort of things. It's no high literature, but it has a few interesting ideas, and is less cliché than a lot of other VNs.

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