Is there any chance you could put a speed limiter on the text in the game?
Hi guys! I have bought and played Guild of Thieves from you (love it!), but I am wondering if it is possible to emulate how the games were for many players back in the day playing on less optimal machines. The text would often scroll slower, rather than coming through as a whole bunch in one block. I enjoyed the slower scrolling of the text, as it gave me a chance to read it, as well as a sense of the game progressing along at the speed I had for my computer at the time. Receiving it all as a whole bunch in one go can sometimes feel overwhelming, especially if your eyes glance to the wrong part of the text first, as finding where it all begins quickly is not so easy.
If we could have a text speed selector for this, that would be fantastic! Cheers!
Comments
Hi There, and thanks for your interest in our remasters.
It would be fairly straightforward to have the words appear at a configurable speed. However, in the originals i think the words would appear in clusters, depending on how they were arranged in messages.
So a given section of text might have been composed of several messages. The original code would have decoded each message (sometimes compressed), then printed that part then it would have continued onto the next part.
The new version still mostly use the same message breakdown. There could be a message delay as separate from a word delay.
What do you think? Any other ideas.
I mainly played the Magnetic Scrolls games on my Amstrad 6128 back in the day, so while you are correct, I do feel that a lot of the slower scrolling was probably more to do with processing power for the text blocks. Translating them from compression to their message form probably took quite a lot of memory to execute, thus the seeming scrolling of the text, rather than it coming out in blocks or as a whole on other systems.
I don't really know how to code, so I am unsure as to how a line or word delay could be implemented. A message delay would probably work, but then you have the problem of shorter messages waiting the same amount of time as larger message chunks, as the delay would be predicated on time between messages, not how many words were in each message and how long it might take somebody to read that message.
My preference would be for a line delay, but a message delay might be able to be worked through nicely as well.
Thanks for the great work on Guild of Thieves btw. Brought back some great memories
A workaround could be a "press any key" to continue when the text is in the last line of the screen