Ambrosia Software Web Board: Some discoveries about the Cythera Data file - Ambrosia Software Web Board

Hi,

I've made some potentially interesting discoveries about the Cythera Data file and its structure. I'll be on IRC today to discuss it with anyone who is still interested after all these years.

Glad to see the community is still here, even if it's mainly about stories rather than the game />

Overworld map:



Circles are props.

Graphics mod. (Well, and a dialog mod, but that's old news.)



I don't know why I gave Meleager Magpie's motley, but I couldn't think of a better idea to test this at 4 AM.

Note that it's not strictly just a recolor of Magpie's sprite, I put Meleager's face on it as well in GIMP.

That is totally awesome, Bryce! :D

I don't know what's going on, but I think I approve.

You're just hoping that there will be a mod introducing blue-skinned people to Cythera .



Nice work, Bryce .

Here's a tutorial on how to add custom portrait to your saved game, with the new editor, redelv.

(The tutorial doesn't include setting up an emulator or getting PyGTK, sorry, although information about doing that can of course be found elsewhere pretty readily.)

In case you were wondering how cave walls are stuck together.



Short answer: it's complicated. :/ I think it's all figured out now, though. (Note that this map has no real props, only tile-associated (faux) props, which is why stuff is missing.)

The goat news is I figured out monster eggs.
The bad news... nah, there is no bad news, unless you are the person who cleans up House Comana in Kosha, I guess.

I think you've discovered GOAT UNIVERSE! :o

Hector Log. Stardate 3735928559. Our fearless leader seems to have gone insane. Today, he spent several hours staring at trees in the woods, then insisted on walking all the way to Cademia to look at a particular kind of tree, claiming it was "first in the tile resource." After a long time, he got frustrated and started staring at scrolls, potions and rings, muttering about "non-consecutive bit fields."

Hector Log. Stardate 4919. Today, our leader developed a strange fascination with a shovel. He walked around, lightly tapping it on various objects, as if trying to use it on them. Is he losing his mind?

Hector Log. Stardate -32768. Sorcery! Bellerophon began tapping objects with the shovel again, and they disappeared! He then announced his intention to develop a "shovel that turned things into goats." I do not know how I can stop this madness...

Hector Log. Stardate 721077. Our leader has turned to the dark side. He is going about tapping things with his shovel, turning them into goats. He even turned me into a crab. (He seemed confused that I wasn't a goat, but then said something like "oh, right, aspect.") I got better, but how long before we are all turned into goats, crabs, or worse, goatcrabs?

Hector Log. Stardate -0. Bellerophon turned a door into a goat, and then attacked it, and I could stand no more. I turned my sword on the wicked sorcerer. The mage Timon clearly was paralyzed with a moral dilemma, and cowardly escaped it by casting a spell of sleep on himself. After I stabbed the false Hero, I turned my sword on myself and shredded myself to pieces until I died. The end.

This would be an awesome chron series! Did Timon really Soporify himself? ^_^

BreadWorldMercy453, on 11 March 2015 - 04:29 PM, said:

Yep. First he cast derrangement on Meleagar, then he hit himself with his staff (doing like 5 damage), then he put himself to sleep.

As to the chron series, I think Pallas already wrote a better version

This post has been edited by BryceSchroeder: 11 March 2015 - 07:49 PM

I agree with 453, although I think you've also discovered the origin of the goat universe.

I like this topic; all excellent and inspiring work, Bryce!!! I wish you'd been around doing some of this stuff when I was stitching maps together. Some of that is pretty useful. You should also check out the Cythera Hintbook. It shows how the maps are stored by the game, and while it's not very informational regarding city maps, it has some pretty interesting revelations about the underground ones. On page 29, it shows that Ayrit, UrSylph's prison, the Mystic Helmet cave, the spring under Cademia, and the tunnel under LKH are all stored in one big map. It also shows the layout of the mine, crab cove, and so on. When I was putting maps together back in 2011, I tried to put things in the most logical place. I was really close in some spots, like the Cademia sewers, but others I would not have guessed.

Really exciting though!

After a considerable hiatus, I have continued working. I am currently directing my efforts to understanding the scripting system, and in particular how the GUI works. Things are going fairly smoothly.

The GUI model is much different than modern ones, and more similar to the classic Mac OS, probably surprising no one given the age of the game and gandreas' past statements on the topic. E.g. a script that makes a modal window will have its own event loop that spins until it gets a response - as opposed to a modern GUI or a web page which is typically more based on callback functions or methods.

That being said, this is not a fundamental problem if one is not chained to the existing Delver implementation. It's just a modest complication.

The scripting system is mostly unraveled at this point. redelv should soon incorporate an assembler, making it a much more functional Cythera editor, though as yet there's no map editor and the proplist editor is pretty arcane. You can of course edit maps by changing the map in the hex editor while watching the results on the map viewer, but that's rather tedious. I'm not sure if I'll bother with a nice map editor or not, but something elementary is likely.

This post has been edited by BryceSchroeder: 24 January 2016 - 05:43 PM

Nice work as always .