Ambrosia Software Web Board: Portraits - Ambrosia Software Web Board

I'm bored of this thread (previously about roasting animals), so I'm "deleting" it and replacing it with a new one. I doubt this is allowed, but come on, no moderators are going to read it. Well, Sely might read it during his Christmas break, but I've got at least four months before I have to worry about that.

So, the new thread is about character portraits. By "portrait" I mean the little picture that appears in dialogue windows and in status windows. Most of the portraits in the game can be seen on Wizzy's Cythera Cast page and the portraits available for the player to use can be seen on Wizzy's Archetypes page. There are two other portraits that I have come across. One of them belongs to "Nothing," an invisible dead guy who hides in the north-west corner of every zone. "Nothing" has the same border as majordomos/servants, so the general consensus is that he is either Peirithous (the Odemia majordomo who was apparently removed in Beta) or the original Pelagon. "Nothing" can be seen on this thread.

The other portrait is one that hasn't been discussed much. I found it years ago by opening Magpie's Pumpkin Patch as a save-game file. It's not supposed to be a save-game file, so it's a little messed up, but it's totally playable. I'll try to attach a screen-shot to this post. Anyway, when you attempt to play the patch as a save-game, your character has a unique portrait. You also have no name and your stats aren't very good. Your health begins at 0/0, and you die when you first level up (not a big deal if you have the amulet).

 Magpor.jpg (50.96K)
Number of downloads: 22

A similar picture can be found here on the Cythera Yahoo! group. I believe you need to be a member of the group to follow the link. The image has a much better colour than the one I'm attaching, and the border is different, but otherwise I'm pretty sure they're the same portrait. The uploader, BlueSphere4, titled the picture "creator of cythera," implying that it's a portrait of Gandreas. I have no idea who BlueSphere4 is or how he/she would know that, does anyone know? BlueSphere4 has several other pictures in his/her album, and they look to be from an earlier version of the game because some of the graphics are slightly different.

 creator of cythera.jpeg (1.89K)
Number of downloads: 16

I've been thinking about the portraits in Cythera recently because of my hacking attempts. In the past, Sely has tried to change the player's portrait with savefile hacking, but has not had any success. I've tried it with Pandora's box a few times too, but can never get any result. So for now I'll assume that this isn't something we can change. (Though this post maybe gives a little hope, and perhaps this is referring to portraits too?)

So does anyone know where the "Gandreas" portrait came from?

This post has been edited by BreadWorldMercy453: 26 August 2012 - 01:54 PM

headless/legless titan is what I always assumed.

Oh, that makes sense... I suppose a titan wouldn't be green if they skinned it first.

Okay, now we're even for me ruining your Ayrit thread ^_~

Edit: I'm not so sure this is it, it just doesn't look right:
 Titan roast.png (9.36K)
Number of downloads: 9

This post has been edited by BreadWorldMercy453: 26 August 2012 - 04:24 PM

Hm, think you could save the yahoo images to your computer and then upload them here so we could see them? Interesting easter egg with that special portrait too.

An image search for "glenn andreas" turns up an article on "Artists del Norte" in a Minnesota newspaper. The Artists del Norte homepage doesn't load because the site is just a shell and the real site is hosted at "http://web.mac.com/gandreas/AdN/…" (web.mac.com was turned down a few months ago). I feel pretty sure the picture in the article is the right Glenn Andreas.

They look like different people to me. The one in the portrait doesn't look nerdy enough for someone who wrote a CRPG set in a version of ancient Greece, and the one in the article, well, does.

Cool find Fiery, thanks! Gandreas *squee*

Hard to tell since it's a side-view, and taken some 12 years after the portrait - I'm not even sure if the portrait is an illustration or a modified photograph? But yeah, the portrait might not be him. I'm curious what the purpose of the portrait is and why it's not actually in the game.

Do you think that portrait may have been an image or screenshot used on Ambrosia's Cythera page or on the Delver website? I've been poking around a little on the WayBack Machine, and I noticed a Kosha screenshot on an old version of the Cythera page that was also in BlueSphere4's album on Yahoo. Unfortunately most of the images on the old pages are dead now, so I don't know if one of them might of been the Mystery Portrait. Also glancing through the Yahoo message board, I just don't get the impression that this BlueSphere4 was a beta tester or hacker or anything like that...

Also I updated the OT with an attachment of the nicer version of the portrait.

Edit: Just a note, but the portrait found in BlueSphere4's album seems to have the same border as most of the LKH characters, whereas the portrait in the Pumpkin Patch game has a unique border that is very similar (different colouring) to the hero border.

This post has been edited by BreadWorldMercy453: 26 August 2012 - 03:05 PM

I would assume you decapitate a Titan before you put it on the roast.

As for BlueSphere4's pictures, looking at the titles of the images on the Delver site (http://wayback.archi...er.com/images/*), I'm pretty sure all those pictures were taken from there. There’s even a "gandreas.gif" (of the right dimensions, too) referred to here, but the image isn't archived anywhere.

This post has been edited by Buzzzzy: 28 August 2012 - 12:54 AM

Thanks for the link, Buzzy

The trouble with the titan is that the roasting animal really looks like it was only four-legged, whereas Titans (and most native creatures) are definitely six-legged.
(Man, I just know some jerk is going to be like "see, this is why you're not allowed to delete threads" )

whoops

This post has been edited by Two Jacks: 27 August 2012 - 09:31 PM

I had never seen either of those portraits before, BW; thank you for finding them. I agree about "Nothing" probably being Peirithous, given his portrait border.

The other one seems very odd. In the screenshot you took, not only is the portrait unique, but the border seems to be unique as well. In the Yahoo Groups picture, the border is the same as LKH characters. I wonder what the reason for that is? I can't figure out why that portrait is included in Magpie's Pumpkin Patch at all.

I remember reading something Gandreas said somewhere in response to a question about custom portraits. He said that the game uses a custom color table which would make most pictures unrecognizable, unless they were retouched specifically for the game.