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Standoff's Ending Easter Egg Exposed
It took just a few busy days of detective work for Wingnuts to solve the Standoff Easter Egg Challenge posed by Quarto last week. Plywood Fiend was the first to capture the screenshot below, and Blaster and Ilanin translated the Kilrathi text based on some key clues. The hidden message screen was found (spoiler) "on the flight deck, just after the final mission when all are gathered around your sabre. The easter egg can be found by clicking one of the nearby barrels." (/spoiler) The uncovered egg is a coded message from Prince Thrakhath to the game's main character! Now how about that song clip that plays along with it?
Whoa! I'm impressed, that was fast. :)
When creating this message, we made sure to provide a few "Rosetta stones" - the first sentence repeating the subject line, the "hahahahaha" bit, the "on my blood and name" phrase repeated from the letter in the KSaga manual, and finally, the Prince's name. There was plenty to go on - but even so, I didn't expect anyone to decrypt it that quickly. Well done!
Incidentally, since the fiction is stored as text files, this little easter egg required quite a bit of effort on our part - apart from creating the Kilrathi font, we also got Pete to create a basic encryption mechanism, to prevent people from taking the easy route and extrating the original text from the TRE file.
But now... you may ask - did we make up all those Kilrathi letters? No, we didn't - all we did was rescale them a bit from the source material. These are genuine Kilrathi letters as created by Origin. And, as always, you have Captain Johnny to thank - because an image of the Kilrathi alphabet was tucked away in the font-related materials on the WCP and SO backup disks. We're pretty fortunate that nobody ever looks at such dull things as fonts, because it meant we could use it for this easter egg . Now that our message has been decoded, though, I'm attaching the image with the original Kilrathi alphabet.
So... who's gonna drop by the Kilrathi language thread and work out what the Tomes of Sivar on the WCP intro screenshot really say? :)
[ChrisReid] [# 9957] [Show comments]  
Prelude to Darkness Keeps Fans in the Loop
In between major chapter releases in the Frontier - Prelude to Darkness series, lew82 creates several other updates on an almost weekly basis. In between the ship of the week (USS Hornblower!) and character of the week (Arnold Wexler!), there's a roundup of progress on the actual movie. Chapter 8 is about a fifth of the way complete.
Well this week was really busy! First off last week Part 7 got put up and I took a few days off animating to put my feet up. So as soon as Monday struck this week I was back into it. And so far it’s going pretty well, currently scene 19 is being animated and I’m about a minute in to the entire part. Scene 19 concerns the dropships launching and how dangerous the launch process can be.
One exciting (if you can call it that) thing that happened was in fact just this morning when I had put together a shot and upon saving was told by my animating program that the file was corrupted – oh my god I said! This two hours of work putting this shot together is now down the tube – so after visiting a few forums to see if there was any light at the end of this tunnel I was soon to discover that in fact this program has a secret autosave folder, for this very problem, and praise the lord I found my shot still very up to date and ready to go. God bless backup files.
Some of you may have noticed that Frontier now has a Facebook page with modest number of fans. I’m really amazed it had any at all – and I thank all of you who are fans for you support, because without I’d probably not bother doing this, so thank you again all who are onboard there. It means a lot to see you took the time to become a fan.
[ChrisReid] [# 9958] [Show comments]
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