Can I make money by


Sun, 3 Dec 95 12:07:00 -0500

= What the big companies don't understand - or simply son't care about -
= is that a textual NPC which acts and reacts naturally is much more
= believable (and enjoyable) than digitized bad actors who reuse the same
= replies and sequences after their lives have been fundamentally
= changed.

Hey have you folks heard of an up and coming adventure game for OS/2 called
"Avarice" from Stardock software? (graphical, but static graphics it seems).

It sounds very impressive, but i'm personally skeptical if they can pull off
what they claim.... you can check out their claims at

http://oeonline.com/~stardock/avarice.html

They are trying to develop a "conversation" engine for the game so that
NPC's can create conversation with you dynamically to a certain extent
(eliza?!). Also the NPC's are claimed to talk to each other in the
background (the game is multi-threaded), sharing info about things, and
about you-- not sure how that will work. They say they are trying to do
something completely new and not have dialog "trees" like adventure games
have had up to this point...

It could be interesting if they can pull off this "dynamic" conversation
thing... the thing that confuses me is that by looking at the (not so
amazing) screen shots (who cares about the stupid orange!!) is it seems to
be menu based... so ... that seems amazingly limiting to me?!

Anyhow... could be interesting... there are a lot of interesting ideas in
their quite long HTML file about it anyhow-- whether this particular game
lives up to it's claims has yet to be seen...

Here's a few excerpts to see what you think....
(sorry i quoted a bit more than intended... but it's a very intersting text,
worth reading I think... )

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About ten years ago, adventure games such as Infocom's Planetfall and
Zork allowed us to enter a virtual world. Admittedly, in those days,
you could only interact with the game through a text interface. You
would type "Pick up the orange" and it would get an orange that was in
a room. You could, to a limited degree, interact with that world. I
remember playing Planetfall for weeks and imagining what the world
looked like and feeling like I was really there.

As time went on, game companies abandoned the text adventure as
graphical games became the vogue. But something got lost -- the
feeling that you were there. That you could taste, touch, and *really*
manipulate objects in that world. To me, virtual reality meant I was
in a "virtual" world where I could do things as if I was there. While
this concept may seem like common sense, the label "virtual reality"
seems to be spread pretty easily. In an age where games have
increasingly become a bunch of nice artwork and videos being thrown
onto the screen with little interaction with the world, it might seem
that game companies have forgotten about true adventure and true
virtual reality.

However, with the introduction of Avarice, a return to true virtual
reality exists. Early beta testers of Avarice have labled it "A Myst
Killer". But Avarice's scope goes well beyond Myst. In Avarice, you
are in a real 3D world. You can pick up objects, manipulate objects in
ways the authors may not have considered, and truly interact with the
world.

For example, in Avarice you could pick up an orange, peel the orange,
break the orange into pieces, step on the pieces and squeeze other
pieces into orange juice or whatever. The beauty of this is that
Avarice is a 100visual game. You actually see the orange (in true
24bit photographic color detail). You actually see the crushed orange
or the pieces of it. You can put those pieces on a table and see the
pieces in their actual size on the table and its size will depend on
how far away you are from the table.

Perhaps you read this and say "No way! No one's ever done that
before!" or "That's impossible! PC technology isn't there yet!" I
include with this file snapshots of the upcoming Avarice Preview in
which you see what I am talking about.

But it gets better than that. There are people in the Avarice world
and you can talk to them -- have real conversations from that. The
people in Avarice will talk to each other and how you talk to them may
affect those conversations. In other words, they are dynamically
controlled people. And like the orange, they are in full 24bit color
detail.

You can manipulate objects such as this oranage in the Avarice world.
Almost like "Myst meets Infocom".

Of course, Avarice takes place in a fully rendered 24bit color world
with an advanced AI so that its graphics are stunning. It offers a
full digitized musical score with mood changes depending on the
situation you are in.

The trick to this is partly the improvement in computer gaming
technology and partly because of the availability of advanced
operating systems such as OS/2 Warp which allows us to create a
dynamic virtual world and still have good performance.

I think you'll find that Avarice may perhaps be the first adventure
game where you feel like you're really there in a way that you can
visually see, touch, and interact with its world.

Bradley Wardell [author?]

Specifications
Full Multimedia support (sound, music, etc.)
24bit graphics support
Multithreaded artificial intelligence engine
Multithreaded dynamic world engine
Super-High Resolution Available.

Requirements
OS/2 Warp 3.0 or later
SVGA 256 color support (hi-color even better)
Double Speed CD ROM
486DX
Supports 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, and higher...
8 Megabytes of ram
Mouse

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---
  ...with love and tomato sandwiches.      <as544@torfree.net>