Back to Roots: Conversation System and Another Bug
Fearyourself/JC has continued to make progress adding support for Ultima 5 to his game engine:
I’ve continued the conversation system and actually have integrated the full labelling system into the game engine.
It seems to me that things are almost finished, one last thing is the fact that certain Npcs can give us items and these items seem to be given via a code that I don’t seem to directly be able to find in the overlay files. I’ll have to go at it with a nice and brutal switch system.
Another interesting fact is that TOWNE.TLK also contained a bug in it. Malik asks for 3 gold pieces but actually took four. I don’t know if this really was wanted or not by the creators of the game, but my fix program now fixes that file too.
Oh, yes…by “labeling”, Fearyourself means that NPCs will now remember your name and, in the future, address you thereby if you give it to them. To illustrate this, he’s produced a short video:
You will remember my name!
As you can see, good Dragons and Dragonettes, the greeting NPCs give you is different when they know your name. It’s a small change, entirely aesthetic in nature, but it’s a nice addition to see even so. Immersiveness in a game depends on such details.
This reminds me of an interesting issue with Ultima 7. The party member Tseramed would attack you if you identified yourself as the Avatar (due to his having a previous run-in with the Avatar impersonator running around, whose name eludes me at the moment). You had to give him your actual name to converse with him.
Now, if you were really unoriginal and actually named your character “Avatar”, you didn’t get two conversation choices labelled with the same string. No, you had just one “Avatar” option, which would get you attacked. So the price of not having a name was having to kill or ignore Tseramed.
It’s funny you should mention that. In my early days of Ultima I had a tendency of naming my character “Avatar”. I think the Tseramed issue you mention had happened to me and I thought it was really weird. It was much later that I read he could join your party.
I adopted my grandfather’s policy of naming the Avatar “Stupid”. It made the NPCs funnier when they addressed you.