Talk:Ultima IV transcript

Hawkwind

The dialogue of Hawkwind is not written in the transcript. --Arthgon 06:28, 27 February 2013 (PST)

Hawkwind's dialogue has ended up in Hawkwind's Dialogue in Ultima IV. Merge? Dungy 13:48, 27 February 2013 (PST)

Done. I have merged it into the transcript of ultima IV. What to do with Hawkwind's Dialogue in Ultima IV? Delete or still better to redirect? --Arthgon 14:17, 27 February 2013 (PST)

I think a redirect is fine. Dungy 14:56, 27 February 2013 (PST)

I thought so. That's much better. Done. --Arthgon 15:14, 27 February 2013 (PST)

Humility

I marked which questions will affect Humility, but I'm not sure if that was the best way. I'm considering reformatting things into a grid since all talk records, aside from LCB and Hawkwind, are uniform over LOOK, NAME, JOB, HEALTH, KEYWORD1, KEYWORD2, QUERY, QUERY_TRIGGER, ANSWER_YES, ANSWER_NO. Uniblab (talk) 00:56, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

New Grid Layout

Team, to be useful I need to reform the entire page. Or more accurately, replace it with the output of a quick little program I whipped up. I am looking at a table-based view of the data.

Here is a sample of what I have in mind, using some data from BRITAIN.TLK:

Britain

Iolo

NAME	Iolo
Pronoun	He
LOOK	Charming bard
JOB	I play for the people.
HEALTH	Good.
PLAY	I play my lute and receive the good wishes of the people.
COMP	If you treat someone else well then they will have reason to do the same.
Trigger	PLAY
Question	Do you like my music?
YES	I would join thee!
NO	A shame.

Joe

NAME	Joe
Turns away	12%
Pronoun	He
LOOK	A drunken fighter
JOB	Yo ho ho... and a bottle... of rum... hic...
HEALTH	And a bottle of...
STON	The yellow stone is in the dungeon Despise...
RUM	Rum... hic...
Trigger	RUM
Question	Give me rum?...
YES	Thanxth... my friend Joe can help with the stones... hic...
NO	Ah, be a joe!

Julio

NAME	Julio
Pronoun	He
LOOK	A solemn bard.
JOB	I seek the true nature of things!
HEALTH	Solemn.
NATU	All things have a true nature!
COMP	Compassion derives itself from unending love!
Trigger	NATU
Question (±H)	Dost thou know the true nature of all things?
YES	Thou art a liar and a braggart.
NO	No mortal can.

Mentor

NAME	Mentor
Pronoun	He
LOOK	A wise shepherd.
JOB	I escaped Magincia!
HEALTH	I am well.
MAGI	Pride was too great in Magincia!
PRID	The city was destroyed by daemons for its pride!
Trigger	PRID
Question (±H)	Art thou proud?
YES	That is not a virtue!
NO	Pride exists without truth, love, or courage!

Discission

It'll look very similar to what's already there, but it won't have all them literal <br> elements strewn about and it helps alert people one 1) how to trigger the yes/no question, and 2) if the answer impacts their Humility score.

Uniblab (talk) 03:54, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

The real hard work is going to be correcting all the hyperlinks. You can see my program's output at my user page. Uniblab (talk) 04:22, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

The grid is a good idea. But I don't know about moving the keywords out of the first column and putting "Keyword1" and so on in the keyword column. I don't think it's necessary to make them bold and centered either. If you want to make the question portion more eye-catching, maybe give "Question" a different typeface (how about italics?). I also suggest reducing the vertical padding or margins or whatever. And I don't know what to make of this "Humility?" keyword.

> But I don't know about moving the keywords out of the first column and putting "Keyword1" and so on in the keyword column.

I'm reporting the raw game data (sans newlines). Each talk record supports two keywords, keyword1 and keyword2. Each keyword triggers a response, response1 and response2. This is the proper way to perform technical documentation. Being that as it may, keeping Keyword and Response on the same line might not be bad. Uniblab (talk) 17:40, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

> I don't think it's necessary to make them bold and centered either.

That's the difference between a bang, !, and a pipe, |. I think we're quibbling over a distinction w/o a difference here, but for my two cents, by making them TH instead of TD it indicates this isn't the game data, but the name of that particular field; i.e., the very raison d'etre for TH. But using a TD for the first column won't drive me to suicide. Uniblab (talk) 17:40, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

> And I don't know what to make of this "Humility?" keyword.

Some questions will impact one's Humility score. Answer poorly and decrease Humility, but answer well and increase Humility. Perhaps the field name isn't perfect, but I'm confident that people familiar with Ultima IV will grok it. Being that as it may, what do you propose? "Does answering this question impact Stranger's Humility?" is a bit long. Uniblab (talk) 17:40, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

I guess what I'm saying is: I think it was fine the way it was, with the exception of the grid, and the way the question part was formatted.--The Ultra-Mind (talk) 15:42, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

> I guess what I'm saying is: I think it was fine the way it was

And I disagree. It was missing data, and what data was presented was poorly indicated. It didn't indicate which keyword would trigger the question. It didn't indicate if the question impacted Humility. Etc.

All that as it may, I've taken some of your suggestions and updated this snippit here and the complete readout on my user-page, User:Uniblab#Ultima IV Transcript. In all honesty, I think anything a player would type should be displayed somewhat differently. Bold "smallcaps" would be best, but bold "regular caps" works for me too. Uniblab (talk) 17:40, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

Definitely an improvement. Now you can easily differentiate between the text given by the player and by the computer (except the "Yes"es and "No"s on the "Humility?" line). Speaking of which, are we certain that Humility is the only virtue that can be affected? I had the idea Honesty might sometimes come into it.

Humility is the only virtue affected by dialog in Ultima IV. Uniblab (talk) 22:39, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

Before finishing up, maybe something can be done about the excessive vertical spacing.--The Ultra-Mind (talk) 20:19, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

I'm quite open to any style consideration you might propose. As you can see from the above, those tables are using the vanilla/generic CSS of the site. If we have a specific class or if we can specify individual attributes via style then I'm sure game. I offered vanilla so we could focus on the content and yes I quite agree now we've reached a point to discuss style. Uniblab (talk) 22:39, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

Perhaps instead of "Humility?" a better heading might be "Humility±?" Maybe. It's worth considering. The trouble is, a long-form explanation simply would not work well. Uniblab (talk) 22:39, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

I totally agree that the missing information is bad. Thank you for working on getting it added.

Would this be a good thing to throw into a template? Then if we decide to fiddle with the formatting later it would be easy to change.

A template would be ideal. Uniblab (talk) 00:57, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

This is a tangent but thought the people here would enjoy this link http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/MagerValp/u4talk/blob/master/talk.html -- Fenyx4 02:49, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

I only have the DOS assets, and I don't even know which version. I lost my original discs a looooooong time ago, so I'm using the GoG.com release. If I had the assets for all releases sure I'd be happy to fill a template with all the information, and hopefully find a way to rig a drop-down to control which release is displayed so the reader wouldn't be overwhelmed. Uniblab (talk) 00:57, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

We can't use "±" because there's no - involved. As much as I'd like to keep it brief, I don't see how we can get away w/just using one word for that label. I'm thinking of "Humility increase", "Humility inc.", "Humble answer", "Humble response", "Humble resp.", to name a few. Unless we just had that 1-word label, then had a legend explaining the various labels.

Answering with pride actually reduces one's Humility score, so yes there is a subtraction, a -, going on here. Uniblab (talk) 00:52, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

:thumbs up: on the template, for the reason given. Likely, we'll want to make changes. Once we have the markdown settled, I can make the template, if your unfamiliar w/those.--The Ultra-Mind (talk) 14:18, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the compliment. I think once we've agreed to all the fields, a template is exactly what the doctor ordered. Then we can divorce formatting from the data. Uniblab (talk) 02:41, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

If you answer a humility question incorrectly then you get a -. So "±" makes sense to me. Perhaps "true/false" would be better than "yes/no" since the questions have "yes/no" answers so maybe that is causing the confusion? "Humility± True" -- Fenyx4 15:51, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

What I would find confusing is that the answer given in the next column is supposed to be the + answer.

Yes to the True or False, and No to the Yes or No. Uniblab (talk) 00:52, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

No, it's not necessarily YES or NO. All I'm reporting is "The answer to this question will impact your Humility score." It could be NO or it could be YES. I'ven't fully decoded that yet. Uniblab (talk) 00:37, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

The answer that gains Humility is always the "No" response. -- Fenyx4 15:11, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

How about this: to save even more space, eliminate the Humility row and just put some subtle notation (which would be explained in the legend) for what the humble answer is, w/the implication that the opposite answer has the opposite effect on your Humility?--The Ultra-Mind (talk) 18:27, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

That might be a profitable avenue to explore. Make the + answer bold or italic or some shit, and simply explain in the legend what's up with that. Yes, an excellent idea.

I've done exactly as you suggested. Uniblab (talk) 02:41, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

I dropped the Humility line, and tagged the Question line. I think this is an improvement. I also created a sandbox to see the full output, User:Uniblab/Ultima IV Transcript. Uniblab (talk) 02:36, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

I like it. Simple key at the top can explain it. -- Fenyx4 15:11, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

Thank you. Uniblab (talk) 21:08, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

Yep; getting close. The only thing is, while it's indicated which questions result in Humility changes, the Humility-positive and Humility-negative answers are left to the reader's intuition. I saw "Art thou proud?" as catch-22. Maybe a "+" and "-" beside the player's response.--The Ultra-Mind (talk) 15:30, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

Agreed. I just got a lot going on at the moment so hunting those people down will have to wait a day or two. When the time comes I'll need to remember there is a cool-down for Humility conversations, Shrine meditations, and camping. So I can't just teleport to all the different locales by hacking the save file; I'll also need to hack my turn counter. Uniblab (talk) 21:08, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

The Ankh character is &#x2625;, ☥, so I changed over to ±☥ in the question header back in my sandbox. Perhaps a superscript ankh would be a good decoration on the humble answer? YES^☥ It might be non-invasive to the grid, but noticeable enough. Uniblab (talk) 01:53, 4 September 2021 (UTC)

Then we're agreed. I made Template:U4NPCDialog to ease things along. Now all we have to do is replace all the text in there. ::shock:: How's your reg ex? I was thinking of a kind of sed-like solution to that using Notepad++. Whoever goes ahead w/the replacement should probably alert the others, so we don't go ahead duplicating others' work.--The Ultra-Mind (talk) 20:05, 4 September 2021 (UTC)

Thanks! RegEx is like a second language to me. I just need to whip up a program that'll scrape the wikiML for the hyperlinks so when all is said and done, Iolo's data still includes a link to Iolo. Or I'll just update things manually via paste, one location at a time, to ensure the biography link is intact. Uniblab (talk) 21:45, 4 September 2021 (UTC)

Figures. I might as well offer a patch as well. Uniblab (talk) 02:05, 9 September 2021 (UTC)

The layout looks great! Uniblab (talk) 01:43, 9 August 2023 (MDT)

Alkerion

Why does Alkerion of Minoc have a questionFlag of 10? I don't know, but I'm going to go visit them tonight and see how to trigger their Question. Uniblab (talk) 00:32, 4 September 2021 (UTC)

That is thought to be a bug as it causes him never to speak his response. It is fixed in U4Remaster, U4 1.01 and in my Randomizer to be 6. -- Fenyx4 04:14, 5 September 2021 (UTC)

Expanding scope and changing metadata therein

I added the Gypsy's monologue and thought we should update everything to reflect that this doesn't just have the dialogue from the cookie-cutter NPCs, but also Hawkwind, British and now the Gypsy. This also meant exhaustively listing all the NPCs whose dialogue is not included. I counted shrines among the NPCs, which I think we should start doing. I know, I didn't think of Shrines as NPCs, but when I was told "my mind is weary from thy last mantra" I thought who said that???!!!. I believe shrines think, therefore they are.--The Ultra-Mind (talk) 14:40, 24 July 2023 (MDT)