Posts made by Wizard

Very nice find, Buzzzzy! I couldn't see any direct images of him from that page; would you be able to link one?

The possibility of an unimplemented easter egg occurred to me, but given that they had a contest and everything, surely there would have been some pressure to do it!

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Looking around his site, he apparently was a part of PrintNet, some sort of corporate print service from the mid-90s? Can't really tell much because their main site was behind a pay wall, but it's gone through a number of hands over the years: Blue-Line Online in the late 90's, where it was folded into the larger "ProjectNet", Cephren in the early 2000's, which itself managed to raise 10's of millions during the dot-com bubble and later merged with Bidcom to become Citadon. Citadon was bought by Opidis, which is now a subsidiary of idox. ProjectNet still existed under Citadon, but who knows what became of those various people and properties over the years?

... Also, I have no idea why I looked all that up except that company lifecycles utterly fascinate me.

I was searching the old Ambrosia Times newsletters to find some Ambrosia-related terms for Pallas, and I came across something very interesting.

In 6.2 What's New, ASW mentions a Cythera contest held by Insanely Great. Using the Wayback Machine, I found the announcement at Insanely Great, plus the contest details.

It looks like a promotional run by Ambrosia in which readers of Insanely Great could enter to win one of 5 Cythera licenses. One winner would receive the grand prize: appearing as a character in Cythera!

Which brings me back to the title. From the AT article:

Well, after a random drawing, the winner was Stephen R. Banks, who is thrilled that he's included in the game.

Now the funky question is... where do you find him? And how do you get him to divulge his real name? Is he the only easter egg in the coming game? Would I be mentioning it if it weren't? Looks like you'll have to kidnap me to find out. Muhahahaha...

I looked through the rest of 6.2, but I couldn't find anything more about Stephen Banks. There are some "easter egg" screenshots in Sneak Snapz. On that: showing Ursylph's prison makes sense, but by showing the spring under Cademia, I still wonder if it was meant to be more than just a healing fountain.

Back to the topic at hand, I searched these forums and found no mention. I also searched the complete dialogues and found no mention. Am I missing something obvious? If not... where or who is Stephen R. Banks in Cythera?

I uploaded the raw data generated from webforum_to_nodebb's converter scripts; that can be downloaded from here. It's basically a Python object containing the JSON entries for NodeBB, and you can automate the import using the "fields_to_db.py" script linked above.

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Regarding the ambrosiasw.com domain name, I was checking the whois records and found that it has been renewed! Just a couple interesting notes:

Originally, ASW's domain was managed by Network Solutions. It looks like Andrew renews it on a 5-year cycle since the previous term was initiated in 2015.

Domain Name: AMBROSIASW.COM
Registrar: NETWORK SOLUTIONS, LLC.
Updated Date: 02-feb-2015
Creation Date: 22-mar-1995
Expiration Date: 23-mar-2020

Last month, not only was it renewed through 2025, but the registrar was transferred over to Tucows.

Domain Name: AMBROSIASW.COM
Registrar: Tucows Domains Inc.
Updated Date: 2020-01-24T05:33:48Z
Creation Date: 1995-03-22T05:00:00Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2025-03-23T04:00:00Z

This made me wonder if the domain was transferred to different ownership entirely; perhaps Andrew was not the one to renew? So I checked his current consulting business and found it also registered through Tucows since 2017.

Domain Name: NYSTUDIO107.COM
Registrar: Tucows Domains Inc.
Updated Date: 2017-03-22T18:02:23Z
Creation Date: 2005-03-07T03:55:56Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2022-03-07T03:55:56Z

I take this to mean that Andrew is still personally involved in keeping the website domain, and he merely wanted to consolidate to a single registrar. The fact that he's holding on to the domain might mean something... or it might not. Either way, the server's still down and he is keeping the domain.

Stream posted to Youtube: https://youtu.be/gXH_-XkNn2E. It was fun; thanks all!

Now this is very interesting! I didn't notice that reference, but it does sound an awful lot like aspects of Cythera's story come from there.

Spoil away, Pallas! I don't know that I'll get around to reading the books, but I am curious about a couple things. Two Jacks mentions that the high one may actually be a shapeshifter in disguise. Is that the case? Cause it makes us question a lot more about Alaric... Although I'm not sure that gandreas would go that far as having Alaric be an Undine, especially if Cythera II would have had Magpie bemoaning Alaric's death. Plus we have the main storyline of the Undine trying to take control of Alaric.

But I do wonder about a twist on that theme. For instance, what if Jhiaxus had been killed along with Jinrai and the one we meet is actually an Undine pretending to be Jhiaxus? Seems odd there were the two beds there but only one died? Gandreas repeatedly warned not to trust Jhiaxus, at least that was my perception of his comments, and it would make sense of everything: gandreas' warnings, the story of the two inseparable lovers being separated, and the eventual downfall of Alaric after our hero has thought to have saved him.

Edit: I was trying to set up spoiler tags, but the main package relies on websockets and dynamic nodebb, which I don't really have configured, so for now we'll just have to warn about spoilers if people don't want them.

Edit 2: Also good call, Two Jacks, about the similarity of the maps!

This may compound the blasphemy, but I wanted to share that there will be a livestream celebrating 20 years of Ferazel's Wand this Saturday. At present, I think both Ben Spees and Eric Speier will be participating! Here's a little promo: https://youtu.be/lgq6QKo6eW8

Thanks for making this thread, BW!

Since the livestream, this topic felt like the last important thing to discuss. Tree of Life was confirmed an incomplete side-quest, Seldane as a language with historic inspiration, and then the hints given about the Cythera sequel.

Looking back through the prophecies, I'd thought of a couple comments as well.

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First Prophecy

In the first prophecy, I agree with your uncertainty about the Lost returning. See, I'd initially figured the "Voice of a God" referred to Alaric and the Lost being the mages, but then with the Voice being destroyed as the last act of the Tyrants, it must be a reference to the Cult of Scylla, which makes sense given the religious overtones tying them together. But that does leave the question of Lost. It makes me wonder as to the nature of the Scylla themselves. Perhaps a subservient species to the Undine or exiled or something, but are they trying to come back in opposition to the Undine? Or are the Undine themselves the Lost? Tavara said the Undine played him for a fool with Abydos, but he was clearly still associated with them during the times of the Cult, despite UrSylph saying the "traitor" attempted to subvert the humans by worshipping false gods.

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Second Prophecy

Again, I agree with most everything you say about the second prophecy. I'm also baffled why it says the Traitors do not fail since that seems to invalidate the Comana brothers. But from what we know about the Cythera sequel, it's not clear that we actually saved Alaric at the end, so I guess they didn't fail? If so, it's also unclear whether or not they were responsible for Alaric's fall or something more insidious (recall gandreas specifically called out "trust no one" when we spoke with Jhiaxus during the livestream).

The Hidden does seem like the Undine since they joined forces with the Traitors, but my initial thought was the Cult of Scylla. That feeds back into prophecy one where the connection between the cult/scylla and the undine is not completely clear.

In this case, I think assigning Master to Alaric is the most reasonable interpretation. The in-game mention of Master is interesting though. Perhaps the Hidden are the scylla and they are trying to overthrow the Undine? Comana may also have been trying to overthrow the Undine in the same way Tavara was working with them while seeking personal revenge.

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Third Prophecy

The third prophecy beginning with the end of the second age and passing of the Great Unifier lines up with the first and last line of prophecy two, suggesting to me that the "Second End" is a reference to the second age ending.

The rest is really open to interpretation. Are there more Air and Fire around to wreak havoc? We know the land will break into pieces, so is the One to Many Cythera itself or a reference to the crolna being broken again? The world is mentioned as being sundered separately, and so is the Opener of Ways (crolna from prophecy two) but as One.

The Fifth Element seems to tell us how the Cythera saga will end. I thought humans had been referenced as a fifth somewhere before but may be misremembering. These "Walkers" seem like something different. I suppose today that refers to zombies, but I expect here it refers to humans or a class of humans like evolved mages.

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Those are my long rambling thoughts about the prophecies.

One and Two are mostly clear. I just question the exact nature of the Cult of Scylla and how they tie into the Lost/Hidden. That question affects a couple little things, but in the grand scheme of the things, we know the third prophecy is more concerned with Alaric's death and the havoc of the other elements until the "Walkers" appear.

I hope this covers a lot of the discussion that was had about the prophecies on Discord. Thanks again for making the topic!

... This reminds me I still need to make a topic about difficulty level in Cythera.

Good point about transliterated as a separate branch, Buzzzzy! I guess it's true that we don't know what all was inspired by Egyptian or Greek, and you and Pallas are right about the original intention for the language possibly being different.

Adding their names and places makes sense too. I recall having some discussion in the past about whether Ayrit and Maayti are the formal place names or more general terms like "home."

We got some interesting comments from Glenn Andreas during the 20th Anniversary Livestream (BW kindly provided a transcript!). Among them was the remark that the Seldane language is based more on phonetic Egyptian than anything else.

I thought we'd discussed the Seldane language in depth before, but I could only find one topic which partly addressed it. At the time, we were understandably looking more at Greek inspiration, so I figured it's time to revisit the discussion following Glenn's comment.

Conventions

For simplicity, I've split the analysis into two sections: written and spoken Seldane. Since we don't know their relation, it's hard to say how related they are. We're given symbols and translations for written signs but only transliterated English for the spoken utterances, which may correspond to symbols but we have no examples or translations to work from.

Also, we need a better name than "Seldane language"... Seldanese? Seldanian? For that matter, is it clear who all used their language? Maybe it's Ancient Elemental. My computer would like to submit Sedan Ian for consideration

Written Seldane

First, I wanted to upload images of the Seldane signs since the links in the old topic are dead.

Ruins

Cave Under LKH Access

Outside UrSylph's Prison

I haven't found a good table plugin yet, so I made a little document outlining the written examples we have:

Table of Written Seldane

The leftmost column is the text representation as seen in the data files. This is likely meaningless since it's only used to map a character to a Seldane symbol for displaying in game.

The top 3 match the signs we encounter as above, while the bottom 4 are only in the data files, unless I'm missing their location in-game. They appear to be part of a puzzle or something that was never implemented.

Based on the translations we have, written Seldane appears partly logographic (which would make sense given an Egyptian basis). All but the first end in "door this" and have matching symbols, one of which looks like a doorway. If so, the "hall" referenced in the first example looks like a caret or arrow symbol. Beyond that, I'm struggling to identify any other direct matches. It may be similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics which included some form of alphabet characters as I understand it. We need Pallas' expertise for this!

Spoken Seldane

Table of Spoken Seldane

Jhiaxus and Uset (Herald of the second Ayrit) say the first; Unhayt (Doorkeeper of the second Ayrit) the second; Seqedher (Watcher of the second Ayrit) third; and the last is a quote from Glenn Andreas himself regarding the status of Cythera's sequel.

Sadly, we have no translations for any of these phrases. Once you learn the language, they no longer give greetings.

The second column of symbols have been drawn directly from the text using the Seldane font, but just as I felt the text didn't have any meaning when being used to display symbols, I also doubt the symbols have any meaning going the other direction here. If the text representation does match with symbols... maybe. At first, I hoped so because of the presence of the door symbol in Seqedher's statement, but Seqedher is the watcher; it's Unhayt who's the doorkeeper. Regardless, if the text is transliterated based on some phonetic structure or rules, then there's likely no connection.

I couldn't understand much out of phonetic Egyptian conventions, so I started looking up the terms with "Egyptian" thrown in, trying to trace any of them to a meaning. I didn't find much, but I did locate some noteworthy mentions regarding the Cythera 2 remark: Har em akhet xepheru.

Har Em Akhet was actually a name given to the Sphinx, apparently meant to impart its two-fold nature.

From Origin of the Word Sphinx:

The word Armageddon is derived from the Hebrew word “Har Megiddo”, which means “Mountain” or “Range of Hills”. In Greek it’s rendered as “Harmagedon”. The Hebrews derived this word from the Ancient Egyptian “Har” or “Ar Em Akhet”, meaning ” “Lord of the Two Horizons”. If we break down the word Armageddon: “Ar” in Egyptian means “To rise”, “ascend”, or “mount”. “Har” or “HR” signifies the name “Horus” or “light”. “Adon” in the word “MegiDDON” is semitic in origin, from the Hebrew god “Adon”. According to the Ancient Egyptian Wisdom Keeper “Hakim Abdel Awyan” the name “Har Em Akhet” was given to the Sphinx to Masculine her from her Feminine name “Tefnut”. The word “Har Em Akhet” may have a hidden meaning, considering the Sphinx is believed to be two-folded in nature, or a two-horizon in nature; half human/half animal. Perhaps the real Armageddon is the war within us all, the constant and perpetual battle we face between our Animistic nature (Lower Mind), and our Humanly divine nature (Higher Mind). Metaphorically speaking, it could be analogous to the adept ascending to his or her higher divinity.

Xepheru was a bit trickier. Fantasy books, essays, and religious systems include references to the name. The most useful discussions of its meaning come from that last link, all in reference to the temple of Set, who is apparently the Egyptian god of chaos, fire, and trickery and who also shares my name in an Americanized form...

Anyways, the image on the Path of Xepher reminds me a lot of our speculation about the Tree of Life, only it's an 8-part path rather than 10. These are the translations given by that author:

Step 1 - Arise
Step 2 - Transform
Step 3 - realize
Step 4 - enter
Step 5 - Take Place
Step 6 - Exist
Step 7 - will be in the Future
Step 8 - introduce the solution

From this, I get the sense of a process or idea of something taking place over time and into the future.

All this is to say I think you could roughly translate Har em akhet xepheru as "king on the horizon will be in the future" or similar. That glosses over many of the deeper aspects about multiple meanings in Har em akhet or the process of going from "unaware" to "aware" along the path of Xepher, but from a high-level, it communicates that Cythera 2 is a process to happen in the future.

Well, there you go! Another topic about Seldanese. What do you guys think? It all reminds me a bit of that one Star Trek episode.

Thanks for the transcript, BW!

It's opening in a separate window for you because the .rtf file downloads and gets recognized as a TextEdit document by your system. You can disable automatic opening of downloaded files to avoid that, so it would just go to your download location and you could choose what to do with it. That's considered a little more secure but wouldn't change much otherwise.

To avoid the Rich Text version download, here's a plain text version which will open directly in most browsers:

cythera_20_transcript.txt

@Pallas-Athene said in Someone was really mad at Andrew...:

1. Looks like the forums are sorting topics by start date instead of last post date, which buries long threads (like the Officer’s Club Bar).

That's very odd. Last post date is tracked inside the topic entry and a supplemental "event" entry in the database. Both those fields get updated by the importer script and seemed to work correctly when making the Cythera forum.

But I can't get the new one to sort properly no matter what, so I'm guessing the latest version of NodeBB has some changes. Well, it certainly does since I had to alter the source to get profiles showing post history—they'd changed the way viewing permissions are handled. If I get a chance to track down the change, it may be possible to fix with a re-import.

2. Is there any reason not to incorporate ATT? I can send you my backup.

Mostly laziness on my part . Although I did think about asking you, I decided there'd be edits to make for the slightly different link structure and that an external link might be a good way to reference your archive.

You're welcome to send your backup! If I can find any other archives about, a re-import would definitely be worthwhile.

3. Since this is in the interest of preservation, would you consider putting a database dump somewhere so others could easily back up your server without writing their own scraper?

Yes! I would like to do this and will put up a copy on Google Drive soon. Since media isn't included, the DB is not too big.

A quick update on this topic:

Recent discussion on /r/evnova reminded me that others may benefit from an ASW forum archive. I elected option 4 because NodeBB's searching is just too good to pass up for something that will be used for reference:

asw.forums.cytheraguides.com

It's read-only to preserve the integrity of the archive. Plus, until I see what the usage stats are, I'm not sure there's much of a community who would use it for posting; even us Cythera folk have migrated a lot of discussion to Discord these days.

Being a separate subdomain also protects the integrity of these boards and makes it easier to fill in missing ones should we ever manage to locate another archive. I've pondered emailing Andrew to ask if he'd switch the server on for a few more days or share the database so we can convert it, but I'm not sure anything would come of that.

Anyways, it's not much but seemed worth sharing since this topic had been left hanging.

I did some updates to the forum yesterday (the default theme is slightly different now). Somehow, all file uploading got disabled, even images, which had been working. I've re-enabled image uploads and turned on generic file uploading for registered users.

cythera_test.txt

P.S. @453 you can surround text with three backtick marks before and after to denote code blocks, like ```. You probably tried that, but I wasn't completely sure. I was also toying around with plugins that would allow collapsible and expandable blocks. Some of the plugins which add spoiler tags claim to do this, but I can't get any of them to work. Some of them are fairly old, so maybe they're not compatible with the new version yet.

The event has been saved to YouTube: https://youtu.be/gLCl7elzN-s. We ended up completing the full game in a somewhat leisurely speedrun, with frequent interjections to look at things like side quests and characters, bug fixes, and hacks/mods.

Thanks for getting this started, @Pallas-Athene! It was a lot of fun.

Glenn Andreas did join us in the text chat, and he offered some interesting points for discussion. I feel satisfied that most of the technical details and leftover in-game content have been addressed, with the most cryptic responses relating to things that would tie into a Cythera sequel. Who knows, maybe we'll see that one day?

Just a reminder that the livestream is coming up tomorrow night. There's a possibility of Glenn Andreas and/or Richard Moss stopping by!

@Buzzzzy said in Cythera Speedruns:

Music and fading have never worked on my SheepShaver build for some reason.

This is a symptom of pre-2013 Sheepshaver builds which lack support for the gamma ramp functions frequently used for fade effects. The main indicator is the screen being visible instead of black during sleep (you can see how the time & location pane updates live). Those older builds were also more likely to stumble over audio, and a number of games like EV Nova and Ferazel’s Wand will crash.

E-Maculation’s forum has a nice collection of recent builds if you’re looking to update.

Wait, so if I had just been standing in the doorway, that might have worked?? I'm both frustrated and thrilled to know that!

@453

Here's the relevant portion from Ake's dialogue script: (I've added a few comments denoted by semicolons)

ConvNext0580:
    conversation_response "more" else ConvNext0808 
    if_not
        call_resource 0xF02
            arg Arg30
            byte 1
        end 
    then Conditional05B1 ;if not talked about Comana, branch down to 05B1
    '"You know, House Comana..."' ;else fall through to this response
    branch Branch0805
    Conditional05B1:
    if_not 
        sys IsInParty
            short 30 ;Milcom
        end 
        sys IsInParty
            short 35 ;Hebe
        end 
        or 
    then Conditional060E ;if Milcom & Hebe not "IsInParty", jump to 060E
    'She looks around nervously...*"Ah, I don\'t know what you\'re talking about."' ;else fall through
    branch Branch0805 ;branch away if fell through
    Conditional060E: ;Milcom & Hebe not around?
    '"I can\'t speak of that now - meet me in our @garden after dark - wait until after my husband goes to bed"'
    call_resource Resources.SetCharacterFlag ;check if character has Persuasion
        arg Arg30
        byte 2
    end 
    if_not 
        sys GetSkill
            global Globals.PlayerCharacter
            short 203
        end 
    then Branch0805
    sys TalkParticipant
        short 1
        byte 2
    end 
    '"I understand your reluctance, but I\'m not sure if I can make that meeting."*'
    sys TalkParticipant
        arg Arg30
        byte 0
    end 
    call_resource 0xF01
        arg Arg30
        byte 2
    end 
    call_resource Resources.SetCharacterFlag
        arg Arg30
        byte 1
    end 
    'Ake lowers her voice to a whisper, glancing nervously around.*"Well, this might just be a rumor, but I\'ve heard that House Comana was behind Ariadne\'s kidnapping."*"I can\'t say anymore, but seek out Halos of House Strymon in Cademia"'
    sys AddQuest
        byte 10
        word 0x021A[0]
        byte 10
        add 
    end 
    '*"Please, I\'ve said too much..."'
    Branch0805:
    branch Conditional01CF

What DDASM labels as "IsInParty" is a call to function #188 in Delver byte code. I'm sure it does some checking for in party, but it looks like it's doing something else as well. If I had to guess, it's being used here to get a distance measure of some kind?

Whatever the case, it looks like you only have to make sure neither Hebe nor Milcom is around to get her to speak with you, which is good to know. Bryce really has equipped us with a powerful set of tools with delvmod!

@Pallas-Athene said in Cythera Speedruns:

I don’t think that a “False (Hacks)” category is interesting.

I agree with that for the most part (although, who wouldn't want to see a chicken rogue run? ). I guess that's why I liked the idea of a third category; many of the exploits are interesting but could otherwise be buried under much shorter False times.

It''s a moot point now though. The running madness of new videos every few hours has slowed way down!

The any% rating is a nice idea. It could be a little tricky to measure because of Cythera's huge amount of optional content, but I can imagine many variations on that. Actually, I think BW's play style is a 100% speed run if you just click through the dialogues quickly.

@Pallas-Athene

What do you think about broadening the classification from True / False over to True / False (Exploits) / False (Hacks)? Despite my original uncertainty, after reviewing the latest speed runs, I agree that the ones using no exploits should remain separate. But I think using minor bugs and exploits should also be separate from outright hacking. Character hacking will entail very different mechanisms to save time; plus this breakdown would give a nice 30min/20min/???min summary for the best times.

@453

As far as I can tell, Ake will talk to you as long as no other NPC is on the screen. I've had her tell me everything through the window if the other NPCs are out of sight, but it's definitely easier to go into the house.

You're right about Ayrit vs. simply using the tunnel. I'm afraid to wander around in the tunnels because of ooze and moss — both of which have caused me trouble in these speed runs. I like how Ayrit gets me away from danger, but it does waste precious time.

Crabs are glitchy. I believe its in the failed video that they started to take on human sound effects for being hit and killed, and yes, they started being treated as blood at one point!

Charax has given me a lot of grief. What I've learned from all this is to let sleeping mages lie...