Talk:Loom (video game)/Archive 1

Article name

Why is this article named "LOOM" and not "Loom (computer game)"?

The Swedish article about this game is currently also named "LOOM" but we are considering moving it to "Loom" (since the object loom isn't called "loom" in Swedish). However, before doing so, I just thought I'd check with you in case there is a particular reason, e.g. that the game was explicitely named LOOM.

Best regards,

Tournesol 19:30, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

• LOOM is easier to type than Loom (computer game) :) Capitalisation is a good way to distinguish between a noun and a title Pictureuploader 23:47, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

I changed much in the technical section, due to much of it being rumour. See what you guys think now. MasterGrazzt 03:58, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

PC CD-ROM version

Just noting that I reverted most of this edit – "the incompetence of the design team", "the greatest atrocity", etc – since it doesn't sound very NPOV. Do many people actually feel that way about the CD version? (I've not come across such opinions before (though I don't know much about Loom anyway), and the current text already mentions the lack of portraits, which this considers "The one striking omission".)

Incidentally, the CD version that I have (which might have come bundled with a Sound Blaster, if I remember correctly, which I probably don't) has a 43.7MB data track and 551.6MB audio track (leaving only about 5 minutes of space), though there's only 4MB of stuff on the data track. Does anybody know why it's done that way?

The structure and apparent size of CD tracks is a tricky subject and can be confusing until you've learned far more about it than any person should actually know ( ...like myself :-/ ) ... and worst of all the accuracy of what you're reporting may well hinge on what program you used to get those figures. EG is it reporting the track sizes with or without the null-data lead in/lead out/inter-track safety gaps that are inserted as part of the burning process to account for the inaccuracy of some older disc mechanisms' head positioning? Does it report data track sizes using the same calculations as audio tracks and vice versa (an incorrect method: to avoid confusion, it should show data as MB and audio as MM'SS"ff or MM'SS.ss"), and if so, which one does it base its figures on?

EG you say it has 43.7MB of data and 551.6MB of audio, leaving 5 minutes spare (of... a 74 min disc? 80 min? other?). 43.7 + 551.6 equals 595.3MB... or ~55MB shy of a at-one-time-standard 74 min / 650MB disc. This is just under 5.5 minutes of CD audio if we assume each minute takes up 10.1MB of data space (to match with the "551.6MB" of track space consumed), but this is incorrect. Each minute of audio is only equivalent to 8.8MB of PC data due to different encoding systems, therefore that 55MB would be closer to 6.5 minutes instead. And it only gets worse if we then tentatively correct for the audio track length being misreported (is it 54.6 minutes ((551.6 x 1024 x 1024)/(44100 x 4) seconds), or 62.75 ((551.6 x 1024)/150 seconds)?) - so the free space could be anything up to a good 14 minutes / 126 MB (59'30" / 523MB used).

Also as stated, there tends to be data-free gaps between tracks, particularly between different track types, and different recording "sessions" on a multi-session disc. If there's a head positioning error you don't want your CDROM mechanism flying off into an audio data zone and potentially misinterpreting that as valid program data, nor do you want your music deck straying into the data track and reproducing the indistinguishable-from-whitenoise information within. Instead you want them to land in the dead zone (in reality, only a couple of millimetres wide, if that) and auto-correct back to the proper place. So you sacrifice a bit of capacity and insert the blankness. The easiest way to do that on a mixed data and audio disc is to just specify a large inter-track gap and/or a spoofed, way too long track run length for the data track (the PC won't care - it instead reads the filesystem information in the data zone and bases its operations upon that). Either way, these tend to get counted as part of the actual track length when analysed by a simplistic CD burner program. Interestingly, 43.7MB of data works out to be almost exactly 5 minutes' worth of audio (single-speed CDROM is exactly 150KB/sec, vs 172.3KB/sec for audio; if it's based on audio data take, it's only 4m20s), suggesting that even though there's only three (3.5") to four (5.25") DSHD floppy discs' worth of data stored within, the disc engineer spoofed the length - or added padding - to a wholly arbitary five minute total length, both for safety and ease-of-production reasons, even though there's barely 28 seconds of actual single-speed data. It's actually two seconds short; however, almost all CDs also include a 2-second standard "lead in" (or track 1 pre-gap...). Add that to the 298 seconds taken up by the data track, et voila. Under the same measure, the audio takes up 3766 seconds (62'46", or maybe 62'44" plus a further 2-second pregap), presumably in one long track, unless there are a great many tracks and you pre-calculated the total for us.

The acid test would be, though - put the disc in an old player. Like, seriously old, old enough that it doesn't detect and auto-mute / auto-skip data tracks. See what total length it states for the disc... 59'30? Or 67'46"? Then play it from track 1, and see what happens when you near the 30-second mark. Does it keep emitting the same synthetic, vaguely patterned but mostly noisy sound? Does it go silent for a further 4'30" (or 3'50") before the actual soundtrack begins? Skip straight to the actual audio? Just hang up entirely?

It's odd, though. I might have expected they would have, e.g. included the game music as CD audio (a la Monkey Island 1 CD), plus the original game data on one track, and maybe the speech data as another data track; it would have been perfectly acceptable to save it in a much more compact format even in the days before MP3, much like Westwood did for the Command & Conquer music, except it might even be possible to save speech in lower quality still than its 22kHz A-law (8bit logarithmic) mono format (already 8x more efficient than raw CD audio, or 7x when the data/audio disparity is considered)... e.g. 15.36kHz ADPCM (4bit) mono, for a 20x space saving vs CDDA... it sounds poor, but for that type of material, would still sound perfectly fine (for example: all of the speech packs for the original version of Worms are replayed at 15.0kHz, and plain 8-bit unsigned PCM, betraying its Amiga roots - and they all sound just fine).

ADPCM needs more CPU power to decode than A-law, which needs more power than PCM, which needs more than CDDA, but it is still a very modest amount (at 15kHz a 486 could happily ENCODE in realtime and a slow 386 or fast 286 play it back whilst almost shoving basic graphics around, so any CD-equipped machine would be expected to be powerful enough), and means the speech data could realistically be copied to HDD in its entirety (a 20~30MB load), or at least have significant amounts of it buffered in memory (one minute taking 3 seconds to load even on a 1x drive, and consuming less than one half-MB of whatever extended RAM the machine has) whilst allowing the background music to stream off the CD almost continuously. Or, more than 30mb could be given over to speech, meaning the dialogue wouldn't have to have been cut down, at the expense of a lesser amount of or no CD music at all (possibly replaced by some kind of slightly lower-quality WAV PCM/ALaw music track instead; eg 32kHz A-8 stereo, still giving 2.4x the music runtime even when saved as a data track). It seems very wasteful giving all that CD audio space over to speech captured at what is effectively 22x telephone quality.

But perhaps, somewhat as I found with the Monkey CD (and certain configurations of Tempest 2000 CD), it's because early PC CDROM installs weren't always accompanied by a sound card. The machine retained its internal beeper for FX, and the speakers or headphones plugged directly into the CD drive itself. You then could have high quality speech and SFX via the CD drive without having to buy and install a sound card... (And most useful it was too, when in the early stages of setting up the retro PC games station currently under my TV, I couldn't get the sound card to work at all - the two games mentioned above remained almost completely unaltered by setting the machine up in that configuration). 87.113.7.150 (talk) 01:15, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Orson Scott Card

I have recently read that Card did not write the dialogue for either the original or VGA version of Loom. Card says on his website that he did not write the dialogue for the game, but rather that Brian Moriarty generously put his name into the credits. He may have helped edit the CD version, since it is mostly the original, shortened, but that does not amount to writing. MasterGrazzt 07:45, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

---

I'd like to thank whoever put a Bobbin icon at the start of the article. It's unconventional but works really well. --Kizor 16:44, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia articles don't have icons, so I've removed it. However, it could be used in an infobox or navigation bar.--Eloquence* 03:32, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

I agree with the removal. I should also point out that the navigation bar is a template and fair-use images aren't allowed in templates. So, that's not an option. --JiFish(^Talk/_Contrib) 09:58, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Comparison to Jawas

How can someone mention that the weavers resemble Jawas, indicating a likely influence/inspiration (it's Lucas) without being either POV or NOR?? Pictureuploader 18:38, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Come on - the Weavers are just dudes in cloaks, like any number of fantasy peoples. Deco 00:41, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Giant hourglasses from Crystal City?

Hello. I remember seeing a picture of the game in a magazine that always has puzzled me. It's a screen of the Crystal City with some giant hourglasses.

Its very strange because you can't reach that screen in the game, but... you can see them from the outside of the castle! So perhaps its a hidden level or something? Or a room that was developed but later not icluded in the game? Anybody knows about this?

And I remember that you can see the hourglasses from the outside of the Crystal City only in the EGA version, in the VGA version they have erased them :-? Weird...

So somebody can help with this?

I found this from the German Wikipedia. I try out a rough translation:

Ursprünglich war geplant, im Zentrum der Glasergilde eine Halle mit drei großen Sanduhren 
aufzustellen. Diese wurde aber aus Platzgründen aus der finalen Version entfernt. 

It was originally planned, that a hall with three great hourglasses should be located in the 
centre of the glassmakers' guild. Due to shortage of space, 
these were removed from the final version.

惑乱 分からん 14:22, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for the info! :)

Taken from mixnmojo:

In Crystalgard, the City of the Glassmakers, there was originally a room containing three giant sandglasses. This screen was cut from the game before its release for disk space reasons. Unfortunately, it was never reinserted for the CD-ROM versions, so what was to happen in that room is still unknown. (However, we can make an educated guess. Late in the game, Bobbin mentions that Crystalgard had housed the Great Scythe, a powerful weapon which can destroy even the Dead. Since he seems to have gotten this knowledge out of thin air, it's presumable that one of the Glassmakers would have told him about it while he was inside the sandglass-room. Because the room was deleted from the game, the necessary expository dialogue probably was removed also, creating a tiny plothole.)

I'm surprised no one's noticed this before. M. F. Luder 16:36, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

I distinctly remember a glass city room in the CD-ROM version that contains the scythe itself. You have to sneak through it, from what I remember, and overhear the workmen talking about it. Presumably this is in the floppy version too. So the above doesn't sound right. Radix 12:38, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Deleted phrase

The phrase ' Bobbin was going to appear every now and then (as a swan) to offer help and advice, kind of like Obi-Wan Kenobi in EMPIRE [The Empire Strikes Back] and JEDI [Return of the Jedi].' was deleted from the quote. Should it be restored, since it's actually a QUOTE, and not some personal oppinion 212.205.213.9 08:04, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, it should be restored. First, it is part of a quote; second, the quote os from the game developer himslef; third, it sheds insight into the intents of the game/series-to-be. Mikademus 14:56, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

Note

This article could use some improvement. It doesn't appear to be properly referenced (I have no idea what the current reference section is referring to), and there also seems to be an issue with insertion of copyrighted text into this article. Please keep these points in mind and good luck improving. // Pilotguy (Have your say) 17:39, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

My freaky memory finds with nothing in this article that was lifted from the game or associated materials. If the draft list was a copy, it'd be many times better. --Kizor 16:58, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

How to fix the Underdogs LOOM CD-ROM patch

The patch compiled by Underdogs does not work well with Windows XP, because of its lack of native ASPI support. It also creates a non-standard ISO for the game data files. The silence before the audio on track 2 is closely related to the size of track 1. Here are the steps to fix this:

• This walkthrough assumes you have the original EGA LOOM, the Underdogs' speech pack (S.P.), and the Underdogs' upgrade pack (U.P.) and you have unzipped them. This walkthrough works in XP and has not been tested with other operating systems.

1. Download and install the freeware CD-burning program "burnatonce". This can do disk-at-once (DAO) burning and can also insert silence into an audio track, operations that are crucial for the gapless tracks that the LOOM CD requires.
2. Download and install the freeware ISO-recording program "ISO Recorder V2". This is used to build a new ISO image.
3. Follow the steps in the Underdog's readme, namely, copy all the game data from LOOM to the IN directory of the U.P., copy the files from the S.P. to the main U.P. directory, and run "ASSEMBLE.BAT". The batch file will do the necessary modifications and the results will be placed in the DATA and OUT subdirectories.
4. Right-click on the DATA directory and choose "Create ISO Image File" (courtesy "ISO Recorder V2") and save it as "track01.iso". (The size should be 4,486 KB.)
5. In the OUT directory, overwrite the "track01.iso" with the one you just created. Open the "loom.toc" file and modify the line that says "SILENCE 4:32:00" to say "SILENCE 4:30:03". Save.
6. Open 'burnatonce' and use the "loom.toc" you just modified as the image definition.
7. Insert a blank CD into your system and burn the image onto it.
8. If everything is done properly, you now have a CD-ROM of LOOM that can be ran directly from the CD.

Additional Notes:

• From the Underdogs' README: "Since Loom causes many CD-ROM drives to repeatedly spin up and down, you may have gaps in the voices, or even entire chunks cut off. This problem is typically worse under Windows NT, 2000, and XP. The freeware program "Nero DriveSpeed" often helps with this; set your drive to operate at 1X or 2X and it will probably stop spinning up and down." - Sage advice from people who know. Since LOOM is centered around music, any interruption can severely detract from the story.
• Due to LOOM being a mixed mode CD-ROM, creating an ISO of LOOM and running it from a virtual CD-ROM does not preserve the audio track.

The above how-to has been relocated to this discussion page until a better place for it can been found, or guidelines concerning the placement of such information has arisen. – Quoth 04:53, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

FYI, this whole process isn't worthwhile, since nowadays you can simply rip the audio track, encode to MP3, and play the game using SCUMMVM. I've done this successfully. Deco 00:39, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Music

I have a vague memory of the music including Saint-Saëns' Le Cygne. Anyone? - If brain hate soul? 13:12, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Question regarding the music as well. Are all of the tracks borrowed from Swan Lake and whatnot, or are parts original score? The way the main document is written, it seems vague as to what the case is.

I can't give a definite confirmation - I haven't seen it in ages - but my folks were able to identify at least three of the game's seven tracks as music from Swan Lake. --Kizor 17:24, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

The game contains 9 different melodies, all taken from Swan Lake. Davhorn 19:06, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Why, thank you. --Kizor 15:30, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

Hello, I question that all the music came from Swan Lake. I agree with the first poster here that it included the Swan from Saint-Saens. Can anyone confirm this with some documentation evidence? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.101.64.31 (talk) 15:18, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Unhooded Bobbin

Perhaps a picture of unhooded Bobbin Threadbare would be a good addition to this article, so folks can see what he looks like under the hood. 212.139.92.4 04:54, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

I would be greatly interested in seeing one, assuming that it would not kill me on sight, but I've played through both versions and I can't remember seeing one. Perhaps there's one in the CD version and I was too caught up in the special effect... --Kizor 02:43, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Bobbin is never seen unhooded, so we can't put such a pic (there is none). At the instance where Cobb is killed, we see only a glowing orb, not his face Pictureuploader 08:31, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Hey, that motif of harmful sensation would be a good link to put in the article. When the plot is expanded it'd be good to remember. Dcoetzee 08:38, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Unless spoiler tags are removed from use, as the crowd of, shall we say, veteran users is trying to cause. In that case, we're better off stopping the expansion right here. For they know not what they do... --Kizor 09:48, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Loom.png

Image:Loom.png is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to insure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

If there is other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images lacking such an explanation can be deleted one week after being tagged, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.

— Save_Us_229 18:28, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Graphic Artist

I think it is important to note that the original EGA graphics have been designed by Mark Ferrari. At their time they were sensational. Personally i even like them better than the redrawn 256 color versions. Ferrari did not do any work on the 256 color versions, but they were based on his 16 color work. His webpage is http://markferrari.com/ --77.190.1.33 (talk) 20:39, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea, please do. CountingPine (talk) 20:48, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Sequels

Well, there are two quotes there and they are separated by "It should be noted that Brian Moriarty gave a somewhat different account of potential sequels in the 2006 ACG interview".
I have read both quotes several times but I still can't find any truth in that sentence. In fact I find them amazingly similar considering they were said (or wrote) at different times. The only notable difference I see is that in the interview he sais that it wasn't created to be a trilogy while in the letter he doesn't specify so.
So, I don't know, am I wrong, should one be deleted, should both be deleted and a interpreted version wrote to replace them (leaving the sources on) or should both of them be left on since each one has some details that the other one doesn't have?

Also, maybe it would be a good idea to add a link to the site of the fan-game since the quote link (that was to its old forums) is dead since like a year ago and I think it is pretty relevant to the topic...
http://www.apeironstudios.com/

190.176.208.117 (talk) 22:50, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Palindrome?

In the gameplay section, the word "Terror" is not a palindrome. I'm just reading through this trying to understand the game.75.72.179.230 (talk) 21:22, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

The word is not but its draft is. I just modified it to try to make the draft more explicit. —LOL ^T/_C 00:25, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

the lucasarts game design philosophy...

...isn't always reliable, it seems. I managed to get utterly, unsalvageably stuck on my first play thru of loom on medium difficulty (where your drafts aren't automatically stored and catalogued) as I forgot/wasn't able to write down one of the early ones - I think possibly one that only plays by itself once. Of course, what's needed about an hour later to get through an important gateway that unlocks the rest of the game, a game that I hadn't saved prior to the point where the draft is played? And is a long enough and complex enough note sequence that trying every permutation in order would have taken about a full day?

OK, it would still have been able to progress with enough patience, and possibly a robot ally, but when you have to perform the equivalent of a brute force password cracking attack to make up for a newbie mistake very early in the game, I'd call that getting stuck and having to restart, as it's much faster to just play through to the same point without making said mistake.

And if you can make it once like that, you can probably go on to make it several times... Loom therefore is a SCUMM game where it IS entirely possible to get unfixably stranded in an unwinnable position. 87.113.7.150 (talk) 02:41, 20 June 2012 (UTC)