Relief Action is a first-person wireframe-3d adventure game edited in France in 1987 by Loriciels.
You play a passenger who is the last survivor of an attack. A monster killed everyone on board but you, and you must find a way to escape back to earth, and prove you are innocent.
I did a lot of manual analysis of the game logic in this old forum thread : Relief Action : half-life grandfather . And could finish this game which was quite mysterious to me as a child.
I am in contact with some of the authors, who kindly gave me some insights to understand some aspects of the game.
Recently with the help of Claude AI, I was able to finally carry through the end of what I started long time ago, so here are the results:
What was done:
Translating the game into English - so everyone can discover this overlooked gem. A menu allows selecting the language
Adding trainer pokes. As the monster is VERY tough, it is more pleasant to explore the game without him killing you at every corner.
Creating an at-scale detailed map. Impressively, the rooms do actually assemble into a spaceship shape.
Fixing some small bugs.
And, specially:
Reimplementing the game engine, so it is now playable on a broswer on modern machines.
I believe that this game was too much ahead of its time, the CPC constraints did not give justice to its design. So this newer version is what Relief Action really deserved !
DISCLAIMER 1 : Distributed with permission from one of the original authors
DISCLAIMER 2 : The initial analysis was done with my own brain, then the translation, the map and the browser version used a lot of AI
For comparison, because I feel that the CPC version of the game that is embedded into the remakes’s browser runs faster. However, I cannot play the actual browser version! I am getting an error that my browser is not supported… but I am using Firefox..?
Hello @rexbeng
Thanks for your feedback. It uses WebGL which should be OK on firefox. I’ll check about this compatibility issue.
In the meantime, would you have possibility to use chrome or edge or chromium ?
It should play on Chrome mobile also.
About speed, on CPC the game plays at 0.4fps. And the text scrolling is also very slow, even when you push space to accelerate it. While playing the original i use to always set the emulator speed to 400%, because otherwise I think it feels boring. Thats why I had to disable the ship explosion timer.
On the browser version, the acceleration is on purpose and part of my modernized version. The ship will explode after 1 hour on CPC, 11 minutes on browser. But this should scale well with the fact you can move and navigate the menus faster.
Cool, thanks for the explanations. I don’t have the same issue when using Edge. On Firefox, there’s a couple of seconds that the ‘blossoming animation’ of the room is displayed, but then gets blanked out before the full room is complete.
I fixed an issue with variable declaration which made the engine think that firefox didn’t have webgl enabled. could you please check again with this browser ?
About game speed, thanks for raising the issue, i did slow down the game ticks so the monster won’t move too fast, and the ship won’t explode too soon. Without having impact on the player moving speed.
Also affects the space bay door delayed opening time, and various events.
Ok, Spanish translation is ready to test. I’m not able to upload my file neither at main page/translations folder nor by using a pull request: it says that uploads are disabled. In any case, I join my file here.
Hola miguel, thanks for your contribution to the project !
About the error: on GitHub only the project owner can upload files directly. That’s why you saw “uploads are disabled”. It’s not something you did wrong.
I do speak a bit spanish but my level is very low, so I cannot review your translation myself.
So i asked Claude about it, and here are his suggestions for improvement. Would you mind having a look ?
Thanks a lot Miguel, great work! It is merged and fits on the CPC. A few suggestions before we build it:
Five new texts were added since your copy (ui.193–ui.197, “Play” button and drag-and-drop help). They are empty in translations/es.txt. (Yeah sorry about that, you didnt know as i only added drag’n’drop today)
“Office” (msg.020, room.13) means pantry here (next to the kitchen), not a study: DESPENSA rather than DESPACHO.
Screwdriver: DESTORNILLADOR instead of ATORNILLADOR (msg.092, msg.131, obj.15/16).
Call signs: “indicatif” is translated as INDICATIVO in msg.075/120 but as LLAMADAS in msg.071/085 and NUMERO in msg.096. Using INDICATIVO(S) everywhere would help the player link the clues to the NMI call sign.
Régler (verb.06) is used on sliders: AJUSTAR may fit better than ACTIVAR. Same idea for msg.162: DIAL → DESLIZADOR/CURSOR.
msg.124: the torch flame “is not enough to drive away the darkness” (DISIPAR LA OSCURIDAD), not to move in it.
Web text: the browser version can show ¿ and ¡ (they are removed automatically on the CPC), e.g. “¿Otra partida?”, “¡Qué ironía!”. A few “!!!” in the epilogue could become a single “!”.
Small ones: INTERFAZ … CONECTADA (msg.068); deck.ord.1 says cubierta inferior while the others say cubierta 2/3.
