GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[Dragonsbrethren]

Perfect Dark had descriptions for each objective. I was wondering whether or not we should keep them. GE's briefings are a lot more in depth than PD's were. I think the descriptions may have been added to make up for the lack of other characters to brief you. All you have in PD is the Background and Carrington/Elvis sections. With objectives on top of the Background, M Briefing, Q Branch, and Moneypenny text, I have a feeling no one would even bother reading it all.

[Wreck]

I like the fact that PD briefed you on the objectives separately, but the characters in GE's briefing's pretty much summed everything up, anyway. Adding more to that might just seem like we're repeating ourselves. There's only so many ways to tell the player how to go about completing an objective. I think M, Q and Moneypenny did a good job of that in the original.
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[radorn]

Unless the briefing structures can be rebuilt "zoinkity-style", I'd say we are bound to either try to bruteforce the original texts into the available slots or engage in some creative rewritting

[Dragonsbrethren]

I'm not sure what you mean. PD's briefing text is actually a bit more flexible than GE's, since it scrolls down instead of being limited to a small amount of space on each page. I know Wreck and I had to rewrite some parts of my Silo mission's briefing to get it to fit on the page, that wouldn't have been an issue in PD. Even which text gets colored red can be easily manipulated (I want to see if we can do different colors, actually).

The briefings are actually just one huge text string. There's one for each difficulty, which just removes whatever objectives aren't available on that difficulty. If we're not going to include objective descriptions, we might look into rewriting the actual briefings to remove the parts that aren't actually relevant to that difficulty. No need to mention contacting Dr. Doak in Facility on Agent, for example.

Last edited by Dragonsbrethren on Sat Mar 20, 2010 11:41 pm; edited 1 time in total

[Wreck]

Ah, good thing to remind me of...
Years ago I was able to make GS codes that modified the colour of the menus. They are mostly blue by default, but can be made a few other shades. Red, green and white, at the least. For now, it'd be nice to change all of the main menus green, to better suit GE's watch theme. It's a far stretch from the watch, but it'll follow the scheme a little closer. That stuff should be stored in the 39850 Index, I hope. Don't know how the red text is setup, though.
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[Dragonsbrethren]

In the text editor, red text is represented by a | character after a linebreak. It makes everything red until the next linebreak. I wanted to try different bytes in a hex editor and see if other colors are already available. Added a bit to my post above, by the way.

[radorn]

Dragonsbrethren wrote:

I'm not sure what you mean. PD's briefing text is actually a bit more flexible than GE's, since it scrolls down instead of being limited to a small amount of space on each page. I know Wreck and I had to rewrite some parts of my Silo mission's briefing to get it to fit on the page, that wouldn't have been an issue in PD. Even which text gets colored red can be easily manipulated (I want to see if we can do different colors, actually). The briefings are actually just one huge text string. There's one for each difficulty, which just removes whatever objectives aren't available on that difficulty. If we're not going to include objective descriptions, we might look into rewriting the actual briefings to remove the parts that aren't actually relevant to that difficulty. No need to mention contacting Dr. Doak in Facility on Agent, for example.

I see... I didn't know how briefings were formatted in PD.
When you said "With objectives on top of the Background, M Briefing, Q Branch, and Moneypenny text, I have a feeling no one would even bother reading it all." I interpreted that such scheme was based on a premade and forced structure, but if you say that all the text is a single block and can be edited as such, then, what's keeping you from copying the original text over in the desired order?
Perhaps the needed hack would be to make it so, after selecting difficulty, you are presented with the briefing sub-screen instead of the objective list.

[Dragonsbrethren]

I think you misunderstood me. By "on top of" I meant "in addition to." It's just an awful lot of text to read. The objectives on the first page would stay, of course, but we'd probably cut the ones out of the briefing if we're not going to describe them there (not much point in having them in two places, IMO).

[Dragonsbrethren]

One thing I don't think we can do are single line breaks. GE uses them in a few places, but I think you need to do double in PD, since a single end character acts as a terminator. I'll test it out to be sure, though. Anyway, here's a quick mockup Facility briefing for each difficulty:

00/Secret Agent: wrote:

M Briefing - You'll be working with 006 on this assignment, the bottling room is the rendezvous point. Don't forget to contact our double agent scientist before you leave, and warn him to get out. He will provide you with a decoder for the final security door. There are no women or casinos for a thousand miles, 007, so even you will be able to concentrate on this mission. Q Branch - Now listen carefully, Bond. Those bombs will be armed as soon as the last one is set. Don't be too close when you set them off or you'll go up in flames as well, and while you're at it, please try and bring back that door-opener undamaged for once. Too much rough handling like the last mission and it might go wrong at a bad time. Honestly 007, sometimes I think you damage your equipment on purpose.

Agent wrote:

M Briefing - You'll be working with 006 on this assignment, the bottling room is the rendezvous point. There are no women or casinos for a thousand miles, 007, so even you will be able to concentrate on this mission. Q Branch - Now listen carefully, Bond. Those bombs will be armed as soon as the last one is set. Don't be too close when you set them off or you'll go up in flames as well.

Personally, I like this. I thought it was wasteful to have three copies in PD, but it does have some nice potential.

[Wreck]

Yes, I agree. It doesn't really take away from the original briefings, either. They'll still be there, but not on Agent. I'd say I'm for this alteration.
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[Dragonsbrethren]

Just tested it, and single line breaks do work in PD. Wreck already knows this, but it looks like red is the only text color available to us in these.

[SubDrag]

By line breaks you mean the * in editor? So they don't break up lines automatically I guess, we need to?

[Dragonsbrethren]

No, they break them automatically, but you can also force them if you'd like. All of the PD briefings I looked at didn't make use of them, so I thought maybe they weren't available there. They are, so we can use GE's text as-is.

[Wreck]

I remember fooling around with GoldenEye's briefings when we first got the PD text modification implemented. It wasn't quite as interesting as what you plan to do with it, but it still looked pretty neat.

Oh, if you are working on the briefings, don't forget to fix any of the "Goldeneye" typos. They forgot to capitalize the second E way too many times. There are a few other random errors, but nothing too serious. Aztec springs to mind.
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[Dragonsbrethren]

Yeah, I'll fix those and some other things. There are a few instances of missing punctuation or double punctuation. A few strings are worded inconsistently with the rest of the game, too.