Ambrosia Software Web Board: Old Glenn Andreas quotes - Ambrosia Software Web Board

I thought it would be fun to try playing through Cythera without any combat at all. It was pretty successful, though there were many times when I was cornered or surrounded by enemies & had to use Directed Nexus. One of the most frustrating things was not being able to get the gator skin boots. I also had to fetch a couple of stalagmites in order to get the Timeflux book, but that was the only occasion that I needed to use Fetch.

So yes, I managed to RESCUE ARIADNE WITHOUT KILLING EUDOXUS!! *Bows*
I used Remote Manipulation to get into Odemia, but Philinus wouldn't have anything to do with me because he said he was too distressed about Ariadne to talk. He wasn't carrying the pan-pipes on him, so I couldn't shakedown them. I gave up for the time, and worked on other tasks. I interrogated the bandit, then left and cured the plague in Catamarca, joined the Ratcatcher's guild, got the mushroom steak (I now believe the mushroom steak to be connected to the skills learned in the guild, but no proof), and then went back to Odemia. I hid my shock when I saw Ariadne safely eating supper with Philinus. I talked to Philinus and he grovelled at my feet, saying he was forever in my debt and it was all thanks to me that Ariadne was home and safe. I had to pat myself on the back. (Needless to say, Philinus was more than happy to give me his pan-pipes ^_~)

o.0 nice work, 453. Is Ariadne also in the cellar, or is she only in Odemia now?

Seems like that quest HAS to be finished, and if you don't do it, the game itself will.

I just checked & Ariadne is not in the cellar. Looks like it'd be impossible for me to get the task checked off at this point. Also, I think it's pretty cool that I've made it to level 5 now without any combat ^_^

How did you do that? How do you gain experience points other than by fighting? Do you get it by completing quests? If that is the case, you must have gained quite a lot per quest to reach level 5? I never keep a look on my exp meter, so I've never really learned how much you get and what you get it for.

I'm not sure what all you get experience for, I wasn't really paying attention to my experience. But yeah, I think completing tasks gives you experience, and I know learning magic and various discoveries give you experience.

I'm amazed that the quests alone are enough to get you to level 5, BW. Gandreas must not have expected players to do too much fighting if they didn't want to.

Switching back to earlier in the topic about the Seldane language, the characters on those signs are indeed a font. I was able to locate the font in the Cythera Data, one of the few unencrypted parts apparently, and extract it with the help of ResEdit and this little tutorial.

The signs are just gibberish. For instance, Gandreas used 'A' to store a 'y' like symbol, but it does not necessarily mean that 'y' is a letter, it may be a symbol that stands for a word in the Seldane language. As such, the game renders the signs as a bunch of random letters; perhaps that means something to Gandreas in Seldane, but directly translated to English they mean nothing. Notably, the Seldane language does not include "L" or "O."

Here's a character chart if you'd like. At the bottom are the two bitmap fonts stored in Cythera Data. I believe the sizes they display best at are 14pt. for Seldane Medium and 21pt. for Seldane Large. I'm not sure how Mac OS X determines this, because in Mac OS 9, the sizes were 12pt. and 18pt. One last note, these fonts *only* have capital letters, so remember to turn on Caps Lock if they're giving you trouble.

Thank you Wizard, I’m totally going to find a way to set one of these as the system font on someone’s computer now.

For those too lazy to transcribe the messages in-game themselves (), they are:

MRIAYNSPY
PN

MRIAYN
USXTWN

SYTINSBY
PN

…which, as Wizard said, appears to be complete gibberish.

This post has been edited by Buzzzzy: 16 February 2011 - 08:39 PM

I think that font is pretty clearly intended to be derived from an early form of the Greek alphabet. I had thought that the "X" character looked strikingly like Ξ (xi) but had assumed it was coincidental. The resemblance of R to rho is obvious, though, as is P to pi, and S appears to be a lunate sigma.

I'm not saying that the text isn't gibberish, but it looks like the font was originally been intended to represent the Cytheran language, having taken a different path from Koine Greek.

It's interesting how very heavily Greek influenced all the aspects of the game. If I'm understanding the game's timeline correctly, this language was supposedly used in ancient Cythera long before the humans arrived. Maybe the elementals themselves were brought to Cythera from somewhere around ancient Greece.

Well Sfiera implied that it may have originally been intended as a human Cytheran font, and got adapted as a Seldane font later, but I suppose it’s still odd. Still, creating written languages isn’t easy to do from scratch.

This post has been edited by Buzzzzy: 22 February 2011 - 10:31 PM

Buzzzzy, on 22 February 2011 - 10:30 PM, said:

Right. My thought was that the resemblance to Greek was an artefact of development, not actually something of significance in the game.

When gathering dialogue, I noticed that Timon says he can't see any connection between the spoken language and the written language. Not sure if that means anything!

I guess Timon reached the same conclusion as us.

I updated the font page to include a TrueType font (Direct Link) based off of the bitmap Seldane font. I must say that it is a bit of work to make a font, although it was a learning experience. The TrueType font offers superior quality in every way. You can type capital letters, which are the full-sized Seldane glyphs, or you can type with regular letters, which are the full-size Seldane glyphs scaled by about 2/3. All the special characters and numbers are based off of the "Argos" font, which is the default font used by Cythera. That way, you should be able to type exclusively with the Seldane font without having to switch to other fonts and get all Cythera-esque characters

Impressive, although I'm not sure when we'd have much of a use for a high-quality seldane font. Still, nice work.

Buzzzzy, on 22 March 2011 - 10:09 PM, said:

Me neither, honestly. But at least it was kind of a fun project.

Pretty cool Wizard! Someone should at least try to use this in the TSs.