MTARZAIM'S PROFILE

It seems quite spot on, with good points made. :)

Except this maybe:

author=OP
2) Repetition weakens writing. Excessive swearing, going over subjects that the reader already knows about are routes to weakening your intent.

We're in games, not books. Players have a lot of stuff to do between dialogues, or even in dialogs, and might easily forget some important infos while abusing chicken or doing hookers for 3 hours.
Repetition is a good thing if it's spread over several dialogues, as long they're all different in execution. That's why we should always set a NPC somewhere which will repeat basically the same important infos to the player, just in case he's lost. Or use an efficient quest log... :p
Even long dialogs need repetition at the end, like "so, this is what we we'll do blablabla".

Another thing I would like to add to the pyramid of a good dialogue : Dialogues should be your last resort to convey information.
The best way to keep them short and meaningful is to use every other way to convey them.
For example, a throne room.
Usual stuff? Yes, but what about those settings:
- Small room with the king and some commoners
- Big room with the king alone
- Big room with guards on a packed front line and the king on a unreachable balcony
- Big room with guards close to the player and king up on some stairs with guards around him
Just by setting the NPCs differently in the available space, we convey different informations.
No need to say "the King is all and almighty" or "the king fears for his life" or "the king is close to his people". The player will feel that, just by entering the map.

Oh, and someone said a good dialog should either advance the story or develop the character. If your dialog doesn't do neither of those, there might be a problem to look into.

Sorry, didn't work with mine ...

First, I didn't found winetricks in the Ubuntu library.
Maybe it's the main issue.

Second, the game (here, Drunken Paladin) crashes à la Windows (the program has encountered a serious issue and must close).
If I disable the sound in Wine, I get a "Failed to initialize DirectX audio", and the program stops immediatly.

I tried it on Ubuntu 10.10, Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz 392 Mo RAM nVidia 8400 GS.
I know, it's an old machine, but that's the point of Linux: make useable what isn't anymore with Windows.

You should also give the Wine configuration used.
Mine was the standard one. Maybe there's something to tweak in it.

Thanks anyway for your work. It will help the Linux gaming community to widen.