MINERVA - read-only archives

I'm mentally working on a Half-Life 2 mod in which our dear Dr. Freeman, set between HL2 and Episode 1 ("... I've recieved some interesitng offers for your services. Ordinarily I wouldn't consider them, but these are extraordinary timesss, mmm?"); the G-man's, ahhhhh (hesitant pause to search for the right word), client would communicate with Gordon via text-interface, since I am not at home with voice-recording any more than Adam is, though I suppose I could use that as a fallback. However, I am having a certain amount of difficulty coming up with a setup which would not instantly be seen as "a ripoff of MINERVA", and which would also, um, work just as well. And also which could be done at any moment no matter where the player was, so no Marathon-type consoles. I am therefore soliciting the advice of the various creative minds around here. So ... yeah.

MINERVA's system was used in Someplace Else, which in turn reuses the GoldSource/Source system to display chapter titles and credits. It's based on Env_message. There is a bunch of parameters which will allow you to change the look of the messages and make them less "Fosterish." :-)

The Ravenholm mod used this system as well, instead of closed captions. The mod also featured a "paper notes" system, but I'm not sure how it worked.

For the love of all that is good and holy, don't use Game_text. It's... wrong on many levels.