Dragonstar Trilogy by Fergus McNeill

[Garry]

I'm currently looking at the 3-part 'The Dragonstar Trilogy' for the ZX Spectrum by Fergus McNeill.

I had this on two files labelled side A and side B. When I looked at side A using Tapir 1.0, I could see that this included part 1 and part 2.

When I loaded part 1, everything is expressed in the first person. The first location starts with "I am standing dangerously close to a cliff edge.", whereas the screen grab on CASA is expressed in the second person and starts with "You are in a flat, grassy field." Is this the same game?

When I loaded part 2, everything is again expressed in the first person. The first location starts with "I am standing on the southern shore of the Lake of Fire.", whereas the screen grab on CASA is expressed in the second person and starts with "You stand on the southern shore of the Lake of Fire."

Hmmm...

I then downloaded the three parts from Spectrum Computing. Same problem. Parts 1 and 2 are in the first person, but their screen grabs are in the second person. I then realised that both sets of screen grabs came from World of Spectrum, but these bear no resemblance to the game. So what's going on? Is there an early version published by Delta 4 and a later verion published by Zenobi? If so, which version is which?

Part 3 is expressed in the second person. CASA says this is a Quilled game, but neither UnQuill nor UnPaws can extract the database. The game automatically says "You wait..." if you don't type anything in. I didn't think you could do that in The Quill. So, is this a Quilled game or not? I suspect that it isn't.

Can the experts shed any light on this?

EDIT: I see from Richard Bos' walkthrough that Part 3 is written in BASIC, so the database is wrong.

[Strident]

I'll have a nose through what I've researched on the "trilogy" in the past.

From memory... Dragonstar was one of the very earliest releases from Delta 4. Fergus was originally selling the trilogy as three games... as quite a price per part too, iirc... until they started being sold as a trilogy.

The difference in screenshots and actual downloads are likely to potentially be between very early versions and later ones; both of which are likely to have been published by Delta 4 originally. GI Games (and then Zenobi) will have only published the revised versions.

Why the change between first and second person... Well, I'll look into it, but I'm guessing it's because early versions of the Spectrum Quill did not allow you to change the default system messages... You were locked into the standard ones defined by the system. An earlier revision of Spectrum Quill came with a way of patching the database to select I/You and then version C of the Quill (which took on board all the enhancements added when porting the Quill to other platforms) finally allowed you to manually tweak the system messages.

[Strident]

To be fair, though... and to completely contradict that as being the reason... the "I" version is looking like the earlier one than the "You" version.

This is a download of the "I" version...
https://planetasinclair.blogspot.com/20 ... nstar.html

The final releases (GI Games/Zenobi) are definitely the "You" version.

Will investigate further.

[Garry]

That matches what you said. The 'I' version would be the earlier version. I haven't found a download for the 'you' version.

[Strident]

Part three is "You" no matter what version you have a download for.

The GI Games/Zenobi compilation has the "You" versions for part one and two...
https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2 ... ar_Trilogy

[Strident]

Just looking through previous threads where I've posted about the game as I knew I'd talked to Fergus about it.

Ah, yes, seems that he confirmed it was a badly worded advert and the games were never sold separately. They should really just be on entry on CASA, imo... but at least it'll allow us to tag part 3 as BASIC with things as they are.

I'll ask Fergus about why part 3 was done with BASIC... The contemporary reviews all mention all three parts were Quilled which is why I think they're currently tagged as such in the archives.

My working theory is that part 3 was developed earlier than parts 1 and 2. Fergus' first games were written in BASIC, before the Quill came on the scene.

[Garry]

Thanks for sorting this out. When I did a search for Dragonstar on Spectrum Computing, only the Delta 4 version showed up. I don't spend much time on that site, so I must have missed something. I've now got both versions, so it will be interesting to see if there's any differences, apart from the 'I' vs 'you'.

I had ported part 2 to AdventureWriter for the Atari, so I thought I should do part 1, as well. (I think it will just fit.) I spent the afternoon getting a text file ready to start the import when I noticed the differences. Now I'll have to start again. Grrr.

[Strident]

I just did a very quick difference check between the two versions of Part 1...

Main differences between I-DST1 and You-DST1:

I-DST1 is earlier, made with version A of the Quill.
You-DST1 is a version C database and also includes some Illustrator graphics.

You-DST1 has additional vocabularly synonyms & shortcuts... L/LOOK added for R/REDEscribe. SEARch and READ added as synonyms for EXAMine.

Plenty of minor text tweaks between the two versions, beyond the I to You changes... Not all of the changes are necessarily positive... such as the addition of spaces before ! and ? in the newer version.

(Note, as previously discussed elsewhere, the system messages from version A to C don't align as version A system messages weren't alterable and aren't numerically defined in the same way as in later Quill. The You-DST1 (version C) has them defined in the same order that other platforms use them.)

Mostly formatting and colour/emphasis changes in things like the location text. Full stops gain a much needed space after them in You-DST1.

Message 6 in I-DST1 does suggest part 1 was at least supposed to be released separately as it says about writing to Delta 4 to ask about the other two parts.

No major code/logic changes or bug fixes.

[Garry]

You beat me to it. I came to the same conclusions. There are a couple of errors in the conversion from 'I' to 'you' and some of the same bugs as in the original.

I was up late last night. I entered all the vocabulary and room descriptions in AdventureWriter and I've only got 1k left over. Oh, oh. I think I'm going to run out of room.

[Strident]

From looking at the code (and the solution!) that part 1 is basically just 90% location descriptions. It's a fairly neatly described game world... there's just not much to do in it. It's unsatisfying now, looking at it in terms of an adventure game, but I can definitely appreciate the personal buzz it must've given Fergus at the time to create such a large world and move around and explore it.

Unfortunately, there's not a built-in compression routine in the Quill. You won't need much space for the actual logic code, but I guess cutting out a few of the locations is going to be your only option to make things fit. There are a few east-west sections, such as the castle southern wall areas, where you could snip a couple of locations without too much impact. The dead-end lake of fire (loc98) could easily be lost. Some of the other dead ends, like the cellar, the base of tower off the dark room etc.

[Garry]

I've got everything in, except for the condacts tables, but they don't look like they're very big. I don't want to change the map, as that's against the spirit of the game, so I've been shortening the room descriptions. I'm trying to keep as much as possible and just chopping out tautology and superfluous words or phrases, e.g. "standing on" becomes "on", and "flat plain" becomes "plain" (as it wouldn't be a plain if it wasn't flat). I've currently got 248 bytes to spare. I'll get there.

You're right though. It's got a huge map with not very much to do.

[Strident]

It's a compromise either way, especially when the game is basically all map & location descriptions and not much else.

You might be able to save some memory in the system messages because some of those are going to be redundant... there aren't any wearable objects, for example, so system message 29 "You're wearing it already !" can probably go.

[Garry]

I'm up to room 85 (that's half way) and I've got 900 bytes free. I reckon the condacts tables take about 368 bytes, so I'll have plenty of room.

[Garry]

Finished. Just need to test it.

Dragonstar Trilogy Part I, The (Fergus McNeill) screen 01.png

[Strident]

Looks good.

Fergus has confirmed that he did part 3 in BASIC because he wanted to do something that he could do in the Quill. It was probably the graphics side of things; although I did suggest it might've been the wandering characters part too.