2018-04-15 08:06:51

I'll say the game sounds interesting, particularly for a doctor who fan like me, but more than that I love the idea of a single ap for the Cog titles, though I wonder if it will also cover the hosted games, and of course what the accessibility will be like?

Oh and the omibus faq is here

Silverworld
We’re proud to announce that Silverworld, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and our new iOS Omnibus Choice of Games app. It’s 30% off until April 19th!
In a world of trackless jungles, colossal beasts, and cruel pre-human civilizations, you must survive the past if you want to save the future! You were only meant to guard the laboratory, but when a treacherous power cripples Doctor Sabbatine’s time machine, you’re left stranded! Face the savage inhabitants of Silverworld and build your own civilization—or plunder the past and return home unimaginably rich!
Silverworld is a 560,000-word interactive time-travel fantasy novel by Kyle Marquis, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
You need allies to survive, but who can you trust? The locals may have already betrayed you to appease their enemies. The empress back home has ordered you to plunder this new world. Your friend survived the crash only for the jungle to infect him, transforming him into something inhuman. And the expedition’s chief adviser has imprisoned the Icons—architects of the universe, masters of time—and fled to build his own civilization.
Can you rebuild Doctor Sabbatine’s time machine and return home? You must protect your timeline, but at what cost? And after leading the people of Silverworld, will you even want to?
• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; straight, gay, bi, or ace.
• Carve out your own Stone Age nation.
• Face giant lizards, renegade airships, feathered apes, and the volcano fortress of the snake people!
• Uncover the secret history of your benefactor Doctor Sabbatine and her robot helpers.
• Confront challenges with threats or charm, overt violence or subtle tricks.
• Use modern technology to survive, or abandon it and go native!
• Protect the past from exploitation, or be the first to cash in.
• Fight the False Icon, surrender to its will, or try to trick it into granting you your heart’s desire.
• Befriend, betray, and romance robots, invincible warriors, and bee women from the Crystal Plains.
• Fight to free the Icons—the creators of the universe—or enslave them for your own ends.
You can save the future…if you can survive the past.
We hope you enjoy playing Silverworld. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.
Available in the "Choice of Games" app for iPhone and iPad
The Choice of Games "omnibus" app is a new way to play our games on iOS: a single app that collects all of our Choice of Games titles in one place.
(The omnibus app is only available on iOS for now, not Android.)
Download the omnibus for free, and you'll receive free, unlimited access to some of our classics, and free demos of our greatest hits and new releases.
Learn more about the omnibus in our omnibus FAQ on our website.
Give it a try!

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.)

2018-04-15 09:59:29 (edited by Jason SW 2018-04-15 10:13:43)

The omnibus app seems to be working fine for me, but there are pros and cons to having the games all in one app.
To be honest, the only pro I can think of right now is that you won't have to log in several times. Cons are that reordering the list or organizing the games is impossible right now. Also... If Choice of Games ever goes out of business, (and I really do hope it outlives me, at least), you won't be able to get any of the games again. The games seem to download on first play, and then you can go offline as much as you want. If you have to restore your device, though, unless you restore from a full backup using iTunes, all of those games will be permanently lost.
Might be worth looking into grabbing the ChoiceScript from the site, if at all possible, in case this happens.
As for the game, I've played through it several times, and it's a fun one. Each playthrough can take several hours, but it's definitely worth the time.

(Edit: I just remembered that iTunes doesn't even do app restores anymore, and I'm not sure if iTunes or iCloud backs up app data, so unless you find a way to keep the games some other way, you'll probably lose them eventually.)

2018-04-15 11:39:48

Thus why I prefer getting the Choice Of Games/hosted titles from Android and or on on Chrome OS, as separate downloads for offline play.
At least with Delight Games on Android , you can play all games offline,, not sure with the iOS vdersion of that platform.

2018-04-15 14:39:29

Hi,
According to the FAQ there is an omnibus for hosted games as well.

2018-04-15 15:15:31

I'm going to miss the game center achievements for each title, God apple are idiots if they think all of the cog/hg titles are the same.

Actually this might almost tempt me to moving into getting the games from the website directly, accept that I've already got such a large collection on Ios it'd be very expensive to try and redo on another platform.
Hopefully they'll find a way to settle things down despite Apple's silly restrictions, and I will admit that having the capability to list games by author when it comes would be nice.

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.)

2018-04-15 15:45:47

I really wish there was a way I can download silver world as a stand alone game as I really didn't want to go through the growing pains with the Omnibus app.
Upon release of this app half of the answers to the FAQ is, Not yet! It’s a feature we hope to add soon. lol I can understand if its as I expect CoG probably had to scramble to get this together in a big hurry. Once Apple labaled all of their games spam. Sounds like the same thing Marty had to face with the Blindfold games. Sheesh! that sucks!

Once this Omnibus is fleshed out, it may have some real advantages, as Dark says, sorting by author would be very cool. But I will admit having CoG go away gives me a shiver considering how much I've spent for all my IOS games.
smile

2018-04-15 16:24:44

Hi,
It's very possible to get all the code and scene files from the website if you have purchased the game in question, as far as I know they don't even try to stop it in that case as long as you don't give them out. I think it would be the same for iOS if you're jailbroken and can grab the apps directly from your phone or something, i'm not sure how jailbreaking works so don't know if that would be possible.

2018-04-16 16:34:08

Hi,
This does seem to be a similar situation with Marty from Blindfold Games, and I am wondering how he got around it. Perhaps the key difference is he used the blind community card, which is OK I guess, yet at the same time, I don't know what to think about it either.
Unlike Marty, Choice of also do game bundles now, and maybe Apple thought that including the same app/games in multiple bundles was getting too much? Yet, saying that, when I go to the heroes rise trilogy bundle, it says I own all the apps already becasue I already got them when they came out.

2018-04-16 23:10:35 (edited by Lucas1 2018-04-16 23:12:54)

Hi,
Yes, the blindfold games dude did get out of it by using the blind card. At least these guys didn't whip out some sort of "Oh, but we're friendly to the LGBT community, and female gamers, and accessibility all at the same time!" thing and actually solved the problem.
I'm sorry if this seems harsh, I just didn't agree with the way the blindfold games guy handled the situation, especially since he told everyone explicitly to contact the accessibiliby department of Apple. What does accessibility have to do with it? Anyways, I'm sorry if this focuses not enough on the topic, and i'll delete it if it does.
<edit datetime="Monday, April 16, 2018 at 5:12:48 PM EST">Fixed a spelling error</edit>

2018-04-17 14:24:48

Hi,
Slightly off-topic for here, but figure it's worth a shot.
@Lucas, would you mind sharing the steps that you've used to get the files for offline play from the online versions, as it's something that would be useful?
Cheers,

Daniel

2018-04-17 15:11:32 (edited by Lucas1 2018-04-17 15:12:43)

Hi,
@daniel,
So first, I usually use wget to get the code files. the command wget --recursive --no-parent www.choiceofgames.com/<gamedir> usually works to retrieve the version of the script engine used in that particular game. The reason I don't just use the publicly available current version is that some of the games use outdated features that were depricated in the engine since the game was made, or they use specific features that hte author implemented themselves in their version of the engine (See Choice of Robots).
Then, you can go to www.choiceofgames.com/<gamedir>/scenes/startup.txt. In that file, you can find a list of all the scene files. If memory serves, the release versions of the engine load from .json files, so you need to get all the .json versions. so startup.txt.json, ch1.txt.json, or whatever. If you want to look at the code, you can get the txt  versions as well, such as ch1.txt.
To convert the txt files to json if you want to do editing, you need a tool that the engine creaters created for that purpose, called generator, I believe. Using that tool is something I can't really explain right now because I'm supposed to be doing an assignment in school big_smile.
You can bypass all this json stuff entirely and just get the .txt versions of the scenes if you just grab the current engine release from github, which loads from txt files. I just wanted to explain the other method in case some games don't work with that version of the engine, such as Choice of Robots.

2018-04-17 19:25:17

Hi
OK i'm having issues with the omnibus app
I can only see like 10 games.
Same in hosted games, only about 8 or 10 titles.
Are you guys having the same problem?

ReferenceError: Signature is not defined.

2018-04-17 23:59:42

Hi,
Lucas, many thanks for sharing these instructions.
ogomez92, I'm also having the same problem. The only thing I can figure is that they're still in the process of porting some of their titles over?
HTH,

Daniel

2018-04-18 12:02:00

Yes, the faq stated that their older games haven't been ported over yet but will be eventually, though I do worry for the game center achievements for each title. I wonder if they will build an achievement system into the ap itself or similar?

Still as I don't have time to check out any new Cog or Hg games right now I'll probably hold off on getting the omnibus ap which likely will also have the bennifit of letting me wait until they've worked out at least some of the kinks.

God apple are morons!

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.)

2018-04-18 17:35:04

I actually like that they decided to do this. It shows that you can do things like these without breaking things, and still have them be accessible, I'm looking straight at you, blindfold games!

I used to be a knee like you, then I took an adventurer in the arrow.

2018-04-19 17:42:11

Hi,
I have to agree with Connor here. All it would take for Blindfold games is for them to include a gesture to take you back to the game list. Then, settings could be universally set. At the same time, it could also depend on coding and such. Also though as others have said, what happens when companies who create apps to encompass everything, end up going out of business? That's lots of games lost.