Conquests of the Longbow -- Reinsert deer scene's

[Subbi]

Hi ScummVM team,

I understood the game Conquests of the Longbow includes sprites for animals such as birds, bunny's and deer to appear in the woods as you wander around.
Turns out only the bunny and the deer are included in the games code, but coded in such a way they can not appear, save for a grinding workaround to have the bunny appear.

Would it be possible to simplify that code in ScuMMVM so that they appear at least on a low frequency basis? It adds some atmosphere to the forest area's.
The code apparantly already included references on how often they could appear, but then made impossible by adding rules that make it again impossible or highly unlikely. By removing those parts of the rules, they would appear more frequently.

It's unclear to me why they went to the bother of creating sprites for these animals but never use them anywhere in the game.

Thanks for looking into....Totally understand if its not possible or a priority obviously!!
Best regards,
Subbi

[Praetorian]

Hi ScummVM team,

I understood the game Conquests of the Longbow includes sprites for animals such as birds, bunny's and deer to appear in the woods as you wander around.
Turns out only the bunny and the deer are included in the games code, but coded in such a way they can not appear, save for a grinding workaround to have the bunny appear.

Would it be possible to simplify that code in ScuMMVM so that they appear at least on a low frequency basis? It adds some atmosphere to the forest area's.
The code apparantly already included references on how often they could appear, but then made impossible by adding rules that make it again impossible or highly unlikely. By removing those parts of the rules, they would appear more frequently.

About nine months ago, a Youtube user, OneShorEye, uploaded this video "The WORST Robin Hood in Gaming (is also the best)" :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYawahBTJaI

At about 12:03 mark into the video, the case of the rare (bunny), untriggered (deer) and cut animals (birds and squirrel I think?) is discussed:
https://youtu.be/MYawahBTJaI?si=_o2I1bTR-I4x8YPA&t=723s

The youtuber mentions that what's described in the video is based on feedback from sluicebox, our ScummVM developer who is expert on the SCI engine (among other things).

At the time, on the ScummVM Discord, it was briefly discussed whether it was considered to restore these animals (or make them more probable to appear) and whether this would be worth it, wouldn't introduce new bugs and/or break the game.
Sluicebox explained the decision not to alter the original behavior here:

yes, we've got script patches from when i went a bug hunt long ago. when i first found the animals (three? four years ago?) i was hoping it would lead to a scummvm option to enable them, but the more i looked into it, it would have been bad. it's not clear if the animals were deliberately cut, or if they're a feature that got accidentally broken and nobody noticed. either way, once you remove the obstacle that prevents them (an easy patch) then they're still crazy rare, and often glitch out, and can break the game. so you'd be left with a fun sounding "Enable Forest Animals" checkbox that in practice does nothing. the bug reports write themselves! i am a firm believer that options must do things. if i thought it was viable and a good idea, we'd have had it long ago. it's best to just enjoy the footage, and my crazy method for summoning the bunny. (i've been failing to write the blog article about this for years; hence the map at the undisclosed hacienda!) and although speedrunners have lots of ways to break longbow, in scummvm proper (not their old unthrottled fork) it is mighty stable

https://discord.com/channels/5812240605 ... 0984147978

[Subbi]

That is a great documentary!!

So it seems it was considered and looked into thoroughly, but resulted in reasons not too.
Would indeed have been a nice optional feature.

Is that footage somewhere uploaded on Youtube or only part of Oneshorteye’s documentary?