2009-04-02 17:36:53

Unfortunately all of our visitors are now going to have to pay the hefty price which results from me first going off to egypt for a week and then being lazy about news posting.

That prise is probably the most monolythic, monumental, momentous and maniacal size of news post we've ever done.

So sit back, relax, and prepare for about three weeks newsage all in one duck!

First off is a newly debugulated version of Smugglers 4 see index which can be Downloaderated here Watch out for some especially nasty pirates here.

then, Mr. thom ward has been plugging away at the new beta of his mysteries of the ancients game. There's no index page as yet, but you can head over Here to the Usa games site to lay your greedy mits upon it.

then, we've had a recent update on the goings on in sommerlund from the folks over at Project.aon, see index A stonking new lonewolf adventure is ready and waiting for you to get your teeth into.

Ffinally, we have several screen reader accessible games, brought to our attention by our very own forumite Bladestorm360. First off is Metroplexity, a game similar to Kingdom of loathing but with a much darker and more synister atmosphere, as you crawl around a cyberpunk style city of the near future, rapidly being over taken by the disturbing new drug eclipse. You can Find metroplexity here

Then is path to pelantas, perfect for any perspective generals. Choose your group of adventurers, train them up to batle others, hunt monsters, or go on quests, ---- while expanding your kingdom and feuling your economy. This is certainly a game for a stratogist, ---- and especially for those who take the long view.

You can begin your command Here on the pelantas site

Last of all, we have another online game, one which has only just become live yesterday (so this news post does stil qualify as being on time somewhere), That game is Legends of Zork, and yes, that is the same Zork populated by Grues, goblins, treasure, and mysteriously noticeable brass lanterns well known from the old 1980's infocom text adventure classics.

Now, it's an online batle game, where you fight creatures for gold and glory. You can find it by adventuring in in this direction

And that's everything! ------ mmm I think. At least with all of this you won't notice the other three hundred news items which I forgot about writing, ----- hehehehehe!

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2009-04-02 20:45:20

Corrected your download link to the smugglers 4 patch, you'd typoed and got a ' instead of a [. No worries.

I'm afraid I've not been able to post much news since I don''t hear about a lot fo stuff, the price I pay for not being on the Audyssey discussion list. That said I realy can't cope with email lists, they just don't work for the way my brain does things.

I'll try and do some work on the database in the meantime. I know I'm far too lazy in this regard.

cx2
-----
To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2009-04-02 22:09:47

Well actually only some of this came from audeasy, other stuff came from announcement lists like project.aon and the legends of Zork game (though imho that one is rather disappointing coming from such an auspicious background).

All my galavanting around the world is finished for the time being though, so hopefully I'll be able to do something with the database as well in the near future as there are stil many games which need pages.

Thanks as usual for fixing my typos, that's incredibly handy, ---- especially in writing bb code.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2009-04-02 22:24:43

Not a problem. Handy that I've got the mod priveliges to do it.

I just feel sometimes like I've got my head stuck in the sand a bit, with not being on mailing lists.

cx2
-----
To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2009-04-03 00:23:04

just commenting in the smugglers 4 update this one fixes all the problems with jaws in
comparation with the old version 1.1 b... now all screens are how they should be and it's all
working fine. it even works with jaws 5, so users that uses old
versions of jaws will be able to enjoy the game.

contact info
email:
matrheine at gmail . com

2009-04-03 00:27:26

Fantastic smile

Been waiting for that for a long time now. Bought Smugglers 4 not long after it came out and haven't been able to enjoy it properly. The combat screen weirdness in particular was a problem.

cx2
-----
To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2009-04-03 00:37:26

I'm glad that one's fixed, it's a nice game indeed.

Perhaps someone who experienced the previous problems with jaws could let nielsbauer know about this, so they know what to include next time they adapt a game for screen reader use. I'd do it myself, acept from a Hal point of view the game doesn't seem to have changed.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2009-04-03 01:24:23

well cx2, the game needs you to get used to it using jaws (i don't know how this is using
window eyes or hal, but with jaws, you never know where to click, well it's not that, almost
all of the times you will figure it out, for example in combat etc, where you have to move on
the words using ctrl +the arrow keys, then using jawskey+left mouse key to choose what you want
but once you get used to it, it will become second nature, i can play the game using this
method just fine, i don't know you. do you can play it without problems as well?
if you need some tips, just ask and i'll try to help.
:)

contact info
email:
matrheine at gmail . com

2009-04-03 03:16:18

Stil sounds a tad complex to me, sinse in Hal you just move over what you want to click in virtual focus and press space bar, ---- for example clicking on "fire missiles" will do just that.

As long as it works though.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2009-04-03 10:14:48

The only complication with the Jaws cursor is the need to keep rerouting it to the PC cursor with insert plus dash. Other than that, just substitute space bar for the numpad slash and you're pretty much there.

I'm pretty used to using the Jaws cursor, it's just in the prior versions of Smugglers 4 (haven't tried the patch yet) the options in the combat screen would appear and disappear almost randomly as I moved about.

cx2
-----
To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2009-04-08 17:25:25

Hey folks, quick note on path to pelantas.  I've been testing it out over the last week or so, and it is a lot of fun, very unique as opposed to most of the stock rpgs out there. 
I've come across two problems however, and if anyone has ideas how to remmidy these please let me know.
Firstly, it's a rather slow game.  I personally like a game that I can really get involved in, but this game requires maybe a once a week commitment, so it's easy to forget about it.
Secondly, setting battle orders for the various heros is a pain with Jaws.  The way it works is that you recruit/train several heros.  Then you choose which heros you think would do best in a battle, and choose five of them to battle five from another lord's army.  But I can't seem to figure out how to delete heros from my battle order, and how to add others.  You can also select various weapon styles and orders for the different heros... they can charge, protect the archers, shoot bows and throw knives and the like, as well as target the leader of the other team, attack the weakest opponent etc etc.
Anyway, great game, but I'm kind of stuck... at the moment, for some reason, all of my weakest heros are selected to fight, so my big buff monster dudes are left to chill.

2009-04-22 18:34:16

Hi all!!! Just a quick help, please! I'ld like playing smugglers 4 but i don't know where to click the first time i play to go to compatibility mode with the screen readers. I'm using nvda. Can someone  help mee please? Thanks for your suggestions. Bye for now!

Claudio

2009-04-22 21:19:16

I presume you mean the compatibility mode in Smugglers 4?

Click on "game settings" then click on "compatibility mode for the visually impared"

A message box will appear with a yes no prompt, click on yes, and a second message box will appear with an okay button, click on that.

You'll need to do this everytime you start the game.

Also note that the second box will say that only the travel screen has been made in compatibility mode and that other screens will be added soon. This is not true though, sinse all screens in the game have now been converted to compatibility mode, ---- though trading is stil a trifle slow.

Hth.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2009-04-22 21:23:34

just curious, is it acessible with nvda? i don't think so. they added a way of reviewing
all the screen with nvda now like jaws, hal and windoweyes? if not, i don't think that you will
be able to click on that, and play the rest of the game.
i'll check in the nvda site to see if there's news thoug.

contact info
email:
matrheine at gmail . com

2009-04-23 02:12:07

Hi!
The only problem is that nvda doesn't recognize the images and I can't go anywere because it reads only panel; there are only panels for nvda!!!
Thanks for your help
Bye bye

Claudio

2009-04-23 10:29:16

The game doesn't have images (or at least it doesn't in compatibility mode), sinse everything is labled, but you do need a wandering curser of some sort to review the screen, such as Hal's virtual focus, the Jaws curser or what I believe is called the window eyes curser (I admit, I don't know much about Window eyes).

In general though such cursers are really helpful in games I find, --- such as in wandering around the net for internet based games or reading panels in interactive fiction or games which use a console style interface like Eamon or fallthru.

If there's a possibility of using such a screen reader, I'd highly suggest it.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2009-04-23 14:05:08

Perhaps you could seek help from the NVDA community to clarify this? While I don't use NVDA in my day to day dealings with computers I do highly believe in it as a project, aand it would be nice if it were possible to use it for Smugglers.

I'm not sure if it would be possible or not, but I still think it would be worth asking just in case.

cx2
-----
To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.