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MS TextWorld: open-source engine that both generates and simulates text games

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Re: MS TextWorld: open-source engine that both generates and simulates text games

#41

Post by feanaro »

korla wrote: post #40
feanaro wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You definitely do not need external hints to solve Zelda games. I've finished many Zelda titles without ever getting any hints. I've even finished A Link to the Past in German by using a dictionary to translate dialogue. Before that, I had not known a word of German.

He is talking specifically about Legend of Zelda, or Zelda for short, the first game in the series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda_(video_gam...

Fair enough. The tree burning should had given me the hint.

That said, I did finish the original LOZ without hints too.

Re: MS TextWorld: open-source engine that both generates and simulates text games

#42

Post by yorwba »

malloryerik wrote: post #36
marccote19 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I'm with the TextWorld team. TextWorld actually uses Inform7. The framework first builds a game object (e.g. objects, locations, quests) according to some settings. Then, it converts it into Inform7 code before being compiled into a playable game. See https://imgur.com/oOcy5kk

How could you run a TextWorld game in a web browser? Use a Glulx file interpreter like Quixe? https://eblong.com/zarf/glulx/quixe/

The "try it" example on the TextWorld page uses Parchment: https://github.com/curiousdannii/parchment

Re: MS TextWorld: open-source engine that both generates and simulates text games

#43

Post by chongli »

jtolmar wrote: post #37
chongli wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be genuinely surprised if anyone can build an agent that can solve Zelda for the NES without any foreknowledge of the game. So much of that game is bound up in the human cultural tropes associated with the monomyth. To finish the game you need to have at least a basic working knowledge of what it means to be a hero. There is no obvious, short-term indicator of progress the way there is in Mario (increase the…

Riffing on this, what about Zelda-like games /with/ foreknowledge? Let's say the game has items that serve as unique keys (like boss keys or the hammer), items that serve as interchangeable keys (like regular keys or triforce pieces), and maybe specific items that modify movement directly (ladder, hookshot, pegasus boots). Additionally it has switches that toggle certain walls. This is a stateful pathfinding problem,…

I don't think the with-foreknowledge case is all that interesting. We already have an expert system agent [1] that can win at the game NetHack [2]. This is a far more complicated task than any of the Zeldas, given foreknowledge.

Without foreknowledge, on the other hand, Zelda becomes a whole mess of meaningless pixels and sound waves whereas NetHack retains a level of intelligibility due to its ASCII interface.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/nethack/comments/2tluxv/yaap_fullau...

[2] http://www.nethack.org/

Re: MS TextWorld: open-source engine that both generates and simulates text games

#44

Post by 4thaccount »

debaserab2 wrote: post #29
4thaccount wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and No. I think they understand the very real limitations of Windows and how developers and power users hate it. Let's compare and contrast the two. Linux has a usable shell that has GCC, Bash, Awk, dozens of specific commands that can be piped together, Perl, Python, TCL...etc all built-in and easily composable. Windows has well...CMD which is horrible, Batch files, VBScript (deprecated), VBA, and Powershell (a…

Or maybe this came out of an MS R&D arm that had free reign on design and it’s not some overall signal that MS has admitted defeat to Linux on the shell. I have a hard time believing this couldn’t have just as easily been windows based with the exact same amount of effort. Windows has fantastic developer tooling that I think you’re downplaying quite a bit. > Powershell is a sometimes great (mostly meh) Powershell has…

Quite a bit in my opinion. Of course if both are Turing complete the answer is nothing, but efficiency in development time and speed should be a factor.

To give an example, suppose you have a directory with 20 .CSV files that are all 200 MB. This is extremely common for me and the files are much larger for many developers. Say you want to extract certain data matching a string and then sort the whole thing into a new file. In Linux this is really simple with a oneliner and it also runs really fast. Powershell has a oneliner capability, but it is quite frankly abysmally slow. The Linux solution takes about 5 seconds and the Powershell takes 15 minutes. Now there is a way to speed up the powershell code. Running it in parallel helps, but the true performance aid comes in calling some C# within the script and now it is definitely not a oneliner. That is the overall issue. The Unix philosophy is simple to execute, understand, and fast to run. The Windows is complex to understand and often slow. Powershell is great in some instances. The language is certainly better than Bash, but if I have to constantly use C# with it...you might as well just use C#.

Re: MS TextWorld: open-source engine that both generates and simulates text games

#45

Post by 4thaccount »

userbinator wrote: post #28
4thaccount wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and No. I think they understand the very real limitations of Windows and how developers and power users hate it. Let's compare and contrast the two. Linux has a usable shell that has GCC, Bash, Awk, dozens of specific commands that can be piped together, Perl, Python, TCL...etc all built-in and easily composable. Windows has well...CMD which is horrible, Batch files, VBScript (deprecated), VBA, and Powershell (a…

I am a developer (Win32; actually started with Win16 and DOS before that) and consider myself a "power user" of Windows, yet never had the feeling you describe. True, the -nix world has a great CLI shell, and some things are much easier there, but on the other hand, the GUI experience is (or at least used to be...) incomparable. AFAIK tiny single-exe-file no-install portable GUI applications just don't exist in the -…

You can certainly create GUI apps on Linux, but I've never found the need or desire as the terminal works so well. Even with a GUI designer, it adds a bunch of code you wouldn't likely need if you had a decent environment. Of course if your app is for non technical folks, I sympathize and understand.

Re: MS TextWorld: open-source engine that both generates and simulates text games

#46

Post by chongli »

taftster wrote: post #38
chongli wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be genuinely surprised if anyone can build an agent that can solve Zelda for the NES without any foreknowledge of the game. So much of that game is bound up in the human cultural tropes associated with the monomyth. To finish the game you need to have at least a basic working knowledge of what it means to be a hero. There is no obvious, short-term indicator of progress the way there is in Mario (increase the…

Zelda was simply a means for Nintendo to sell Nintendo Magazine subscriptions. They had to have made a killing on subscriptions, and they were absolutely required for solving games like Zelda. For example, you have to place a bomb in this one obscure location without any in-game clues as to said location. Or burn a tree. Here's the connection to your post. I think a human and a computer have about the same chance of…

At least a computer could be programmed to drop bombs in every rock wall in the game. For a human, that would be too brain-numbing hard.

Programming the computer to drop bombs everywhere is giving it way too much foreknowledge. I'm envisioning a computer agent not even knowing what a bomb is. Having to figure out how to beat Zelda without any context for the shapes and colours on the screen, let alone what bush to burn to find level 8 or where to play the recorder to open level 7.

This would be a test of general intelligence so I have no problem giving the agent access to the Internet. If it can figure out how to find an FAQ for Zelda and make sense of that information well enough to win the game then more power to it! That's much harder to achieve than building a bot with all of the rules of Zelda pre-programmed in.

Re: MS TextWorld: open-source engine that both generates and simulates text games

#48

Post by tavianator »

debaserab2 wrote: post #29
4thaccount wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and No. I think they understand the very real limitations of Windows and how developers and power users hate it. Let's compare and contrast the two. Linux has a usable shell that has GCC, Bash, Awk, dozens of specific commands that can be piped together, Perl, Python, TCL...etc all built-in and easily composable. Windows has well...CMD which is horrible, Batch files, VBScript (deprecated), VBA, and Powershell (a…

Or maybe this came out of an MS R&D arm that had free reign on design and it’s not some overall signal that MS has admitted defeat to Linux on the shell. I have a hard time believing this couldn’t have just as easily been windows based with the exact same amount of effort. Windows has fantastic developer tooling that I think you’re downplaying quite a bit. > Powershell is a sometimes great (mostly meh) Powershell has…

> Or maybe this came out of an MS R&D arm that had free reign on design and it’s not some overall signal that MS has admitted defeat to Linux on the shell.

Bingo (I'm on the TextWorld team).

Re: MS TextWorld: open-source engine that both generates and simulates text games

#50

Post by tracker1 »

escapecharacter wrote: post #8
pault wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to use Windows at work after ten years of development exclusively on Mac and Linux. Once I set up wsl at work I found that almost all of my gripes about developing on Windows were gone and a month ago I switched my home office to Windows. If you had told me two years ago that I'd be using Windows full time as a Dev environment I would have asked you what were you smoking and can I have some. I have to say thou…

What program do you use for command line work? I’ve found Powershell and Cmder clunky compared to macOS terminal and any Ubuntu terminal.

Hyper for bash, powershell ise for ps (really limited)
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