Journal is useless!

[YamiNoRyuu]

Does anybody have any idea what the journal in your quest menu is for? It's always just empty for me, just curious......

[John S]

For most special encounters and dialog, you can chose to record the information you see. It's useful for keeping track of recipies and whatnot. After you record the information, it appears there.

[YamiNoRyuu]

but how do you record information? and btw, i heard people talking about sholai. what are they? ty

[Cyber_Skaarj]

Whilest you are talking to an NPC, a little book icon is shown in the corner of the window. Click on that to record what they are currently saying.

 

Sholai are people from outside Shaper lands, it was them that started the whole chain of events off when they landed on the Barred Island and found the original Geneforge.

[Dikiyoba]

The journal is still pretty clunky though. It worked better (at least for me) in the Avernum series (or at least A2, which is the only one I have). I never use it at all for G1 and only rarely for G2 to keep track of who will make me stuff with which ingredients.

 

Dikiyoba.

[Marlenny]

Quote:

Originally written by Cyber_Skaarj:
Whilest you are talking to an NPC, a little book icon is shown in the corner of the window. Click on that to record what they are currently saying.

Sholai are people from outside Shaper lands, it was them that started the whole chain of events off when they landed on the Barred Island and found the original Geneforge.

I cannot believe it. I've played Geneforge for years, and I never knew how to record the conversations. I had always wondered about the journal, but by the time I joined SW I had already given up on it and forgot to ask. I can't wait to tell my lil brother when he wakes up; he kept bugging me about it for months.

Edit: You would think that after 3 years in here I would know how to type properly.

[Student of Trinity]

What I find painful is that you can't quickly scroll through the Journal, but have to laboriously click down. So if I record too much, I know it will be too much trouble to find anything. Hence I hardly record anything, and never end up needing anything I have recorded. Hence I have no real use for the Journal.

[YamiNoRyuu]

ok, well thanks guys. i might use it to record recipes.

[MagmaDragoon]

Quote:

Originally written by Student of Trinity:
What I find painful is that you can't quickly scroll through the Journal, but have to laboriously click down.

No, that isn't true. You can use the little blue sphere to scroll quickly: just hold the mouse click on it.

[Nick Ringer]

I got good use out of it. Although a good idea would be to allow selectable text to copy (instead of whole conversations/descriptions).

[Micawber]

There's one game, can't remember if it's Geneforge or not, where even after you delete notes you have to scroll through all the empty slots in order to get to the ones with info saved in them. That's rather annoying.

 

Personally I preferred the exile 1 & 2 model of saving text to an external txt file, which you could then open in the text editor of your choice, to perform regexp searches and so on.

[Lilith]

Quote:

Originally written by Micawber:
There's one game, can't remember if it's Geneforge or not, where even after you delete notes you have to scroll through all the empty slots in order to get to the ones with info saved in them. That's rather annoying.

Exile 3 and BoE sometimes do this. You're right about it being annoying.

[Dikiyoba]

Originally by Micawber:

 

Quote:

There's one game, can't remember if it's Geneforge or not, where even after you delete notes you have to scroll through all the empty slots in order to get to the ones with info saved in them. That's rather annoying.

It's Geneforge. And Geneforge 2. Seeing the labels without having to scroll through them all is nice, but the deleted slots that don't go away is a terrible feature.

 

[Empty]

[Empty]

Dikiyoba.

[Vespucci]

Quote:

Originally written by Dikiyoba:
Originally by Micawber:

Quote:

There's one game, can't remember if it's Geneforge or not, where even after you delete notes you have to scroll through all the empty slots in order to get to the ones with info saved in them. That's rather annoying.

It's Geneforge. And Geneforge 2. Seeing the labels without having to scroll through them all is nice, but the deleted slots that don't go away is a terrible feature.

[Empty]
[Empty]
Dikiyoba.

The empty slots do go away, but I'm not sure what makes it happen. I think it's shutting down and reopening the game. (Don't forget to save!)

I use the journal *a lot*, because I only have time to play a couple of zones per week and I need to be able to refresh my memory. I like the journal size, much better than the Exile games.

The journal has two minor quirks I occasionally find annoying:

1) If there are empty slots, those are filled first (may be in sequence you deleted them), which can make entries hard to find.

2) If what an NPC tells you changes, you cannot record the new version unless you first delete the old version. For example, Clakkit in G1 tells you different things about what the serviles think of you, Pinner tells you different things about your appearance... This feature is a consequence of the game's method of ensuring you don't record duplicates of entries. It probably shouldn't be messed with, as the alternatives are likely to be more annoying.

[Dikiyoba]

Originally by Vespucci:

Quote:

The empty slots do go away, but I'm not sure what makes it happen. I think it's shutting down and reopening the game. (Don't forget to save!)

Thanks for the info. Dikiyoba briefly tested it and it appeared that quiting and reloading the game worked.

[Tesability Black]

The only things I've used the journal for are to record recipies, important coversations that one should definately need to remember and books. Hehe, I'm a bookworm, I like to sneak into my journal and read them time and time again.

 

Oh, I also save whenever something funny happens text-wise. Those are just gems, don't you agree?

[Aran]

Indeed. Sometimes I've even taken screenshots, to avoid having to load up that specific save file to read it again.

[Nick Ringer]

Thus, of course, you would like nothing more than selectable text, right?