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"everything was re-written from the ground up, everything apart from the initial concept and some character design ...and the rest is history."

"The project is more influenced by film and literature rather than other games, we want the experience to be as original as possible and as such we have made a calculated effort to keep away from other games in the genre."

"All of the game (apart from initial background story and some character designs) had to be re-written, all the characters had to be created in 3D and animated, all the background scenes re-created, all the sounds, coding and music?..basically everything had to be redone or newly created for the PC version. This is not an old game that has been dressed up. This is the original concept, dusted off and re-created."

Also, the game has been in production for 10 years and rewritten few times. I think these guys deserve a "Hard core audacity" award...

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You can also ignore the myriad of requests for help or errands that they ask for, but again you will be well served if you don't. Some are side events, some more related to the bigger and central tasks at hand, but you may not always know which is which. More than that, if you help then the Talan will like you. Which is a good thing, because your reputation will determine exactly how helpful they are regarding your endeavours. If they like you enough, and you undertake the right tasks, you can even convince them to stop riis production, mining, and several other key production tasks which support Kroak's soldiers. This will in turn have a direct effect upon the soldiers. A lack of food makes them weaker, and no raw minerals makes their weapons degrade. All of which lead to easier foes when it comes to doing battle.http://www.quandaryland.com/jsp/dispArticle .jsp?index=753

Why don't you go to http://www.econym.demon.co.uk/ and explain to this guy that the sea-shells he makes with a single object and a well-chosen formula are impossible? And go to this page: http://www.f-lohmueller.de/pov_tut/pov__eng.htm and tell the guy writing these tutorials that show complex rendered scenes in just a dozen lines of code are impossible? And your next stop should be here: http://www.povray.org/ and then compare the images you saw in the POVray hall of fame to this scene from Myst classic: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~dwbruhn/Terragen/Myst.jpg and tell me that they would all take the same amount of time? The scene from Myst runs to 45 boxes, 37 cylinders, 6 triangular prisms, the tree objects (which look like a cone with a bark texture, about 10 cylinders for the branches, a .png texture with transparency and a leaf fractal rendered in green scattered around it, joined together as a merged object and copy 'n' pasted about 16 times), two height fields (one for the ground and another for the mountain...height fields can just be monochrome bitmaps with a random scattering of noise in them, which, when fed to the ray-tracer, get interpretted as white-high-Y-coordinate, black-low-Y-coordinate, grey in-between), and a sky texture (in POVray, that's the Bozo texture with about 0.7 turbulance and a color-map of four colors, two whites and two blues.)

But hey! You got it, that's impossible!!! Isn't this the same damn crowd that screams Linux is too hard to use (which makes my 8-year-old daughter superior in computer skills to you)? http://liw.iki.fi/liw/texts/linux-anecdotes.html Go tell THAT guy that it's impossible for a 21-year-old who starts out with no computer to write an entire operating system that sees global use.

Go tell a literary scholar that it was impossible for Robert Louis Stephenson to write "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde" in three days: http://www.the-wow-experience.com/resources/NEW_Pu blic_Domain_Products.htm

Go to this page and tell this guy: http://www.quandaryland.com/jsp/dispArticle.jsp?in dex=723 that he's full of hooey when he says:
"Slideshow Adventures are cheaper and easier to make than the 3D equivalent. Hobbyists can do them for fun. Small independent developers can produce reasonable (even excellent) games on a shoe string. They're a way to start for those hoping to make the big-time. For the Adventure genre to thrive it needs a supply of Adventures. If Adventures are limited to productions costing tens of millions of dollars there won't be very many of them."

And then go to hell so the rest of us can have a decent conversation for a change.

" Slideshow Adventures are cheaper and easier to make than the 3D equivalent. Hobbyists can do them for fun. Small independent developers can produce reasonable (even excellent) games on a shoe string. They're a way to start for those hoping to make the big-time. For the Adventure genre to thrive it needs a supply of Adventures. If Adventures are limited to productions costing tens of millions of dollars there won't be very many of them.

More seriously one can feel as involved with a 2D game as with a 3D game. It's a question of accepting the limitations of the medium, and letting one's brain fill in as necessary. You don't have to do any more than you do when you pretend a picture in a gallery is a 3D scene. For us to see a 3D scene in a 2D picture takes a lot of sophisticated mental image processing - optical illusions came about from this. "

So that's the kind of thing I was talking about. So, OK, give it 2 months? Hee hee...3?

My line is, one of the main things I hear about Why Linux Doesn't Catch On is the classic complaint about the lack of really good games. People rave about Myst to this day. I say, there's a gold-mine waiting to be tapped for the person who brings immersive adventure (even a 2-D slideshow) to the Linux desktop.

http://www.quandaryland.com/jsp/dispArticle.jsp?in dex=414 I was being sarcastic about being the only one to have heard of it, but darn near close! It's ancient history, now.

What made Schizm the best game for me (second only to the complete Myst series), and killed it for everyone else, was the difficulty of the puzzles. One puzzle actually requires the use of trigonometry to solve. Another requires you to first crack a code on two seperate tablets, then translate the numbers from base 12 in order to derive meaningfull co-ordinates (you have to discover what base the numbers are on your own). Yet another actually required you to win two games in a row playing the logic game "bridges" against the computer - no kidding, with artificial intelligence playing against you... and since the reward is to raise both ends of a bridge, you get to the other end and discover the *same* puzzle there, too! Like Riven, you had your choice of puzzles to solve at any given time, and ended up doing a lot of running around picking at them individually. The game got a handfull of glowing reviews, an avalanche of frustrated people declaring that they'd given up on it or downloaded the cheat guide, and vanished off of store shelves within the month...as in 'discontinued' not 'sold out'.

It is point & click just as the 3D Sam & Max sequel was going to be that tis team was working on before LucasArts pulled the plug. Some very interesting comments in this new interview. And the first (early) screenshots here.

It is point & click just as the 3D Sam & Max sequel was going to be that tis team was working on before LucasArts pulled the plug. Some very interesting comments in this new interview. And the first (early) screenshots here.

That should help