Leisure Suit Larry 8: the Larry that never was...

Man that 3D dude looked funny and cool to bad they canned the project and the maker......


Warning: this movie is 5.3 http://www.thedierks.com/allowe/download/L8test.avi


anywayz I actually just wanted to test my sig thingie

[Rodéric]

big image worth nothing :p

Can you remove it ?

Downloading video...

[Arwin]

For comedy purposes, I've decided to pick this ancient thread ... if mods disagree, have at it ;)

Some (fairly wild) rumors on a new larry coming:
http://www.eurogamer.net/article_discussion.php?article_id=88406#justposted

Personally, my thoughts on this are that they should only release one again once voice recognition can be done sufficiently well (which I guess is feasible today already). That's the only acceptable replacement for the brilliant text driven engine that lay behind all these excellent sierra adventures. For those who can't play using voice commands, its back to the keyboard, with only perhaps an unlockable cheat (or available to people with a speaking and typing disability) that gives you an option to select any of the available commands at any given time that can be browsed in a tree with the mouse.

Reading about Mass Effect prompted me again to remind myself of how brilliant text driven interfaces had become, and I've even just started writing my own version, that also learns from speaking with you. With consoles coming with keyboards and sufficient power to do speech recognition (and I think I can come up with a more interesting user interface for such interaction without speech or keyboard as well), I'm really hoping (vainly, but hey) for this to make a come-back. If you ask me, adventure gaming died along with its text driven interface. :P

[DJ12]

Nah, what they should do is get Al Lowe back on board and let him make it.

Cum Lauda was absolute tripe, Lowe made the Larry series, without his sense of humour the game is worthless in my opinion.

[Arwin]

Well, there you go ... another rumor turns out true:

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=90959

Incidentally, I did start on a new text adventure interface that actually learns while you talk to it. It seems to go pretty well into the direction that I want it to go, though as always I lack time (my holiday was completely ruined by a sequence of health issues, that are thankfully now in the past, but cost me 3 weeks including a valuable holiday). If there are people interested in developing this text-interface with me, feel free to pm me.

[Cartoon Corpse]

what about text to speech engines? are there any QUALITY commercial products out there (large variety of voices). man! amateur games would explode if you could get your script done without voice talent.

i know Bellcore was working on modeling the vocal tract like 2 decades ago. then, during the voice over actors strike a few years ago, the 'suits' mentioned text to speech engines replacing voice actors in a few years.

the only thing i've found on the internet is handicapped people tools (like from AT&T) that are of pretty low quality. and of course the little useless dohicky that comes with windows...which for some reason has been reduced from 3 voice choices to one.

imagine the modding scene creativity when you can produce your own scripts and dialog in your mod without the hassle and expense of studio (home or otherwise) and actor mess.

[Arwin]

Well, if you have a good text interpretation and production engine, then you can easily just add speech in and output to that later. But the foundation of text interpretation for me is the most important point of focus - I could never create text interpretation or production software that competes with anything out there, but I am much more confident of my knowledge of language programming, with some AI background, a degree and a lot of knowledge of language, some earlier experience of text analysis programming, and 20 years of basic programming experience (though the last 10 years have been more important than the first). ;)

I have given it thought though, like engine support for different 'flavors' of speech (colloquialisms, accents, etc.)

But the text input-output is what I'm working on now. I have a good text memory storage model I think, and I am now working on the reproduction and interpretation parts. I'm also using separate threads so that interaction can be more pro-active than just you type something, I type something back. I've actually considered even if I could make this into an interface in general, like, asking a computer persona something like "find me an email by person x on topic why sent to me somewhere in the last month, how much space do you have left on drive c, remind me of all the things I've told you about person y, etc." Probably some of these things already exist, but I like programming and this is a fun project (which, yes, could work really, really well with voice to text recognition, obviously).

Note that all this being in this thread should be related back to how much I loved typing commands into Larry's text interface. ;) (lest people think I'd be getting way off-topic ;) )

[Cartoon Corpse]

sorry i hijacked it. but it IS ancient and you DID mention something on (loosely) a subject i've been interested in. and i used to be a software developer (now a DBA) couldn't stand the IP (and the lawsuit) constraints on that job (unwriten and unspoken rules till you get sued and everybodies like "you didn't know that?"...and im like "wha? no")...anyway i used to work for bellcore, so know some things from their history (and at least they were up front about IP issues...paid $1 cash on first day (AFTER you have the job) to sign an IP paper...apparently in NC your OWNED without you knowing it...no agreement)anyway i do my software work on my own time while pulling down a decent salary as a DBA which is challenging in it's own way (LARGE shop) and there is little to no issue about 'inventing'....but i digress. i have CS degrees as well. language/grammar coursework. i'd love to find some quality method of voicing a script in a realistic way. if you ever run across any software that can model the vocal tract and couple that with your language interpretive stuff (context sensitive grammar...i bet that IS complicated) you're working on, let me know.

what sorts of things would you search on to research such issues? maybe i don't know the jargon of this domain well enough.

[Davros]

what about text to speech engines?

theres one built into windows freespace2 open can use it for mission briefings
http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/4660/dd2ct9.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

as for voice commands janes usaf supports them

[Arwin]

I just came by this interview here:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=237733

I never realised that Larry 7 still had the text parser available ... though I think I never played it either. :) Maybe I should give it a shot.