User talk:Huwmanbeing/Archive

This page is an archive of old messages originally posted to User talk:Huwmanbeing.

Pat Hurst's Gazetteer

So, you've done a fair amount of digging into obscure Eamon stuff. Ever run into this Gazetteer that Pat Hurst put together? Or, maybe, Pat Hurst himself? Hope that you're well, etc. --TFerguson (talk) 22:11, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Hi, Tom. I haven't come across Hurst's gazetteer anywhere, but it sounds like it'd be a fascinating piece to read. I'll do a little digging this week and see if I can come up with some leads.

By the way, I wanted to mention that the adventure articles you've been writing are excellent! As one who enjoys Lovecraft, I thought The Tomb of Y'Golonac seemed particularly interesting; I've never played it before but now I might have to give it a try. ╠╣uw (talk) 10:27, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Well, in that case, you'll understand the analogy that Pat Hurst was playing August Derleth to the chaotic and heterogeneous "Eamon mythos." And, while opinions of Derleth may vary, I share the same impulse to organize. (E.g., I had a ball with the "Flora and Fauna of Eamon" page.) Your wiki has been a pretty good outlet for that. I'd just love to see what Pat Hurst had to say. He is/was a very talented writer.

Thanks for the compliment on the articles. In regard to The Tomb of Y'Golonac, Wade Clarke put up a review on the IFDB for it recently. That may be what drew my attention to it. --TFerguson (talk) 16:18, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

I've had no luck finding the gazetteer, but I'm reasonably sure I've found Pat, so I'm snail-mailing him. Hopefully he'll get a kick out of receiving an inquiry about it after a quarter of a century. :) ╠╣uw (talk) 09:03, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for looking into that. Here's to hoping that it pans out. --TFerguson (talk) 19:29, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Success! Pat reports that he still has a hard copy of the gazetteer which he will scan and email in the next week or so. He says it's just a couple of pages; apparently he planned to expand it if he created more adventures, but since he didn't, the gazetteer remained quite brief. However, I'm sure it'll still be a very interesting piece to read. I'll keep you posted. ╠╣uw (talk) 10:43, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Consider me impressed at your sleuthing skills. Pat Hurst is one of the few "big names" to have no apparent internet presence; no email on the Lysator page or posts on the old alt.games.eamon. Thanks for finding it; I'm very stoked. --TFerguson (talk) 21:08, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Enjoy the gazetteer! ╠╣uw (talk) 11:42, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

Super awesome. Really, really awesome. --TFerguson (talk) 23:44, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

PC Eamon

Oh, yeah, I've been playing around on the PC Eamon pages. I'm pretty proud of finding those relics and have a feeling of responsibility for them. The wiki is pretty awesome. Is there a reason that it hasn't yet been publicized? User:TFerguson 12:57, 12 April 2013

It's wonderful you've been able to find those adventures and document them. The other day I came across PC Eamon's entry in a PC-SIG catalog from '91 and wondered how many people played it, and how many tried writing adventures for it. Do you think there may be others out there yet to be discovered?

As for the wiki: I did email Matthew, Frank, etc. in March to tell them the wiki was officially open, but so far it hasn't gotten any mentions on the site. I'm not quite sure where else I should announce it, but I'll look around a little and see; if you have any suggestions, just let me know. Thanks! ╠╣uw (talk) 11:30, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the archaeology has turned up very little recently. As I recall, in the Player's Manual, Jon Walker thanks "all of the local high school students" (or something to that effect) for writing modules. And Justin Langseth, in Lord of the Underland, invites players to contact him for further modules. Beyond that, though, I'm not aware of any other PC Eamon activity.

What I am disappointed about is the absence of the Eamon 3.0 written for the Atari ST by Michael Penner. At some point, he uploaded this and two unique adventures to GEnie but I can't find the files. Penner was really very talented and I'd have liked copies of these other, presumably more advanced, adventures as well. I've appealed to the Atari ST enthusiasts but it seems most of GEnie's Atari ST archive just disappeared.

With respect to publicity, there needs to be a blog post at the least. If neither Matthew nor Frank put something up soon, I'll have to do it myself. User:TFerguson 21:25, 16 April 2013

I'd be glad to help sleuth out possible leads on Penner's files if I can, though it sounds like you've already dug quite deeply. I do hope they can be found somewhere.

BTW, I also wanted to mention that we haven't yet been able to get a working disk image made from that Adventurer diskette I got through eBay, but still hope to. ╠╣uw (talk) 10:45, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Well, caches of old files and disk images are presumably abundant on the internet and I'm sure that I haven't exhausted them. If you happen to stumble across "EAMON3_0.ARC," "OASIS.ARC," and "PROVGRND.ARC," these are the three Penner files I've been pursuing.

With repect to the Walker PC Eamon, you've probably noticed that someone with a Richmond, VA IP address updated the Wikipedia entry on Eamon some time ago who seemed personally acquainted with the Walker Eamon. The entry mentioned a number of original modules for that system archived on compact disk. A bit of sleuthing reveals that there is a Jon Walker in Richmond who has also lived in Marshfield, WI (the home of the Jon Walker responsible for PC Eamon). It's reasonable to suspect that it was Walker himself who wrote that entry and, moreover, that he has some unavailable material archived.

With respect to the Adventurer, I'll look forward to seeing whether you can get a disk image. Irrespective of whether or not you're successful, I remain mindful that I owe you a drink... User:TFerguson 12:40, 18 April 2013

Wiki questions

Hi.

Sorry about interupting the discussion regarding pc Eamon etc, but I just had a vague question on the wiki. Since Huw has done such a great job in terms of creating stubs for lots of important topics and structures for adventures, authors etc, I notice that when a major update is made to an article it doesn't appear on the main page, since only recently created articles do, not updated ones, and yet there are stubs being written into full articles like Thomas Ferguson's recent entries on Eamon pro which visitors would likely find interesting, and if visitors believe interesting stuff is already! being written they are more likely to contribute as in fact I did after seeing Thomas' blog post.

Might a link to view most recently unstubbified articles be put on the main page? or maybe an announcements section where editers can announce any contributions they think might be important.

If it's not been done already, perhaps someone could also post to facebook about the wiki, since I gather from Frank several ex Eamon authors have been on there too who might not necessarily see the blog.

I have also posted a link to the wiki on the database entry which might help too.

On that subject, I'm not really convinced we need a page for Draconis Entertainment specifically, since as far as I'm aware all the titles which Adora were! developing have pretty much sunk without a trace, indeed Draconis' most recent priority is updating their existing games for windows and mac (and telling everyone not to use windows xp anymore). I actually removed the old page for the proposed eamon adventurers guild game from the audiogames.net accessible games database four years agoo during a general clean up of games that had been announced but nothing more.

Draconis rarely if ever make announcements (indeed their chief developer is not exactly the most pleasant or forthcoming person when talking to the accessible games community), so even if the Eamon guild game were in developement we'd not know until it was actually released.

About the best thing you can say for the proposed Adora game is that it let myself, ---- and the vi gaming community in general hear about Eamon and so run into Eamon deluxe :D.

Sorry about the several wiki editing bodges I've made, ---- I'm still getting used to this since up to now the most I've had to do with wiki editing has been adding the odd sentence or two to wikipedia pages, and that not often, and whilte it's not unlike the html used for the auddiogames.net db there are some differences and I confess I'm not exactly great at formatting.

Hello! Your suggestion about showing a list of recently-expanded articles on the main page is a good one. I can certainly see it being useful for visitors to know which subjects have new content, regardless of whether the corresponding articles are new or old. The main page's current dynamic list of recently-made articles is generated by a special MediaWiki plugin; I'll see if there's something similar I could use for recently-expanded ones (and may also investigate adding an announcements section).

As for publicizing the wiki, I'm afraid I've neglected doing much on that front, but a post on Facebook would I'm sure be good, and I appreciate the mention on AudioGames! Just let me know if you have any suggestions for other forums where you think we should announce the site.

Regarding Draconis and Adora, yeah, they're only very weakly connected to the world of Eamon. Given their association to an interesting (though uncompleted) version of the game, I erred on the side of liberality and set up discrete articles, but it's true there's little to no activity with Draconis and not much relevant to say about them.

When it comes to wiki editing, it certainly has its unique quirks and can take a bit of practice. For several years I was a regular editor of Wikipedia and got quite familiar with the markup, so I'm happy to correct any formatting and presentation issues when I see them. (I also have some experience with rhetoric and composition, and lean on that for editorial tasks like tightening up grammar and phrasing.) The main thing is to get the info in. It's really been interesting to watch articles expand and grow! ╠╣uw (talk) 10:27, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

Hi.

a list of expanded articles would be good, I've enjoyed seeing people write about the different adventures myself, particularly since obviously since I only really know Eamon deluxe and what I've read of others from reviews it's nice to get an idea of other things. When i spoke of "announcements" I was essentially thinking just of expanded articles, since it'd be nice for people to know what adventures had been fully written up, but if you can persuade the wiki to do this automatically all the better.

Regarding Draconis, I've expanded the article with recent happenings plus some links to further info on audiogames.net, so that should do unless something changes, though given what I've seen Draconis up to recently I'm not sure how likely that is.

As to facebook, unfortuantely I've not got facebook myself, but maybe it's worth asking Matthew clarke or Thomas if they could mention something since I gather there has been activity in the Eamon facebook group, and anywhere that advertising could be done would help.

One of the intrinsic problems with Eamon, which paradoxically is part of the reason I find it so unique myself, is that it falls betwene two stools. The main interactive fiction community look down on anything that doesn't have a complete parza (though to me this is one of Eamon's strengths since we don't have guess the verb puzzles), neither do they think combat should really happen in text adventures since they're mostly hung up on Zork style affairs. On the other hand, the community who play muds and brouser based mmorpgs tend to go for stuff that has hyper huge pvp and grind worthy mechanics, so even among the sorts of people who do! play textual games, there is something of a limit with Eamon to begin with. that being said, if this wiki can be worked out it'd be a great introduction and resource for people newly discovering the system and it's history and in fact I did.

On more practical matters, well I hope the editing etc is okay, since I don't want to cause more trouble than I'm doing.

Well I'm glad some of the edits are at least vaguely useful, and hopefully I'll get more of the formatting as time goes on through looking at other peoples. As regards Draconis, I've put in what details seemed related about their current projects and state, so maybe the page is okay as is, though certainly if they ever do announce more work on Eamon I'll let people know (though seeing the direction their recent news and new releases have gone I'm not too convinced that their current head developer is likely to restart the Eamon game).

As regards announcements, if you can get the wiki to automatically display expanded articles that would likely do, since it's those I was primarily thinking that visitors should really be made aware of, I rather enjoy reading them myself.

I don't unfortunately have facebook myself, but maybe someone like Matthew Clarke could mention the wiki there, since I gather that they've had some major discussions and met some interesting people like Nathan Segerlind over there, and obviously if authors could edit their own adventures that would be great. I'll also see if I can think of anywhere else where Eamon news might help, though it's a little difficult being as of the people who play textual games, the interactive fiction crowd don't like anything that doesn't have a full parza and look down on stuff with combat mechanics (odd, since I myself couldn't stand illogical or guess the verb puzzles), while the crowd who play brouser mmorpgs and the like tend to just want hyer stat grinding and pvp challenges, and Eamon wouldn't really be mechanical enough!

but I'll see, maybe some of the gamebook fans would be interested, certainly it's quite unique which is why I myself became interested when I started playing Eamon deluxe, ---- indeed I'm looking forward to the next lot of edx convertions.