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Source code for Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and other Infocom games

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Re: Source code for Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and other Infocom games

#141

Post by duskwuff »

magduf wrote: post #128
jackhack wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and ran in Those games felt miraculous back in the day. I still recall the amazement I felt playing the detective game Deadline ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadline_(video_game) ) and the way the simulation moved on in real time -- people wandering through a house, or suspects fidgeting nervously or offering additional info while I questioned them -- even if I didn't enter a command and merely waited. Appreciatin…

>40,000 bytes for all code and data. Wow. That sounds impressive, but it really isn't that much, because it's text-only. If you want to see something truly impressive, look at Super Mario Bros. on the NES: the entire game is about 64k! Most of the NES games were on that order of size, and they were graphical real-time games. Also, I'm pretty sure that you'll find with these text-adventure games that they compress qui…

> I'm pretty sure that you'll find with these text-adventure games that they compress quite readily down to a fraction of the size you stated.

You might be surprised. Infocom games don't store text as ASCII; they use a more compact format [1] which packs three characters into every two bytes, and allows for "abbreviations" of commonly used text fragments. Obviously it's nothing like a modern compressor, but still surprisingly effective.

I tested GZIP and XZ against a sample of 19 vintage Infocom games. GZIP only managed to compress them by 30%; XZ did a little better at 40%, but still nowhere near what you'd expect for text (70-80%).

[1]: https://www.inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/z1point0/s...

Re: Source code for Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and other Infocom games

#143

Post by Spoom »

djsumdog wrote: post #135
ballenf wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original King's Quest had a puzzle which required writing down the alphabet forwards and backwards to encode Rumplestitskin as the secret word needed to get the magic beans. (You could "win" the game without the beans but you'd miss out on a really cool portion of the game and your score was far from the max.) The in-game puzzle hint was far from helpful. I played the game for a year before getting a hint book. R…

Kings Quest V had TONS of instances where if you didn't react to a situation immediately, you'd lose an item that would be required later and you wouldn't realize it until you got stuck. (Throwing the fish at the bear or that shiny thing in the nest before the bird picks you up). KQ6 and 7 were setup so it was impossible to get stuck, but 5 was not. KQ3 had that annoying path you had to transverse and time limits unt…

If I recall correctly, it is possible to get stuck in King's Quest VI; there are items that you require to get out of the catacombs, and without them you're stuck once you're inside. I believe they obliquely warn you by kicking you out first and telling you to "prepare", but you can still come back without the items and they don't specifically list them, and at that point they'll happily throw you in without them.

I found this out when playing this as a kid without knowing how to look up a guide. Fun times.

Re: Source code for Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and other Infocom games

#144

Post by bitforger »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #137
bitforger wrote: post #136

Reminds me of that time I hacked together Zork for the Google Home. You can still try it out, I think, if you say "Ok, Google, let me talk to Dungeon RPG" https://github.com/mitchellgordon95/DungeonForGoogleHome

Oh, cool! I'd love for someone to make a more fully-baked version of this. Get some good audiobook narrators and voice actors, and add sound effects and stuff! Smart assistants, ironically, feel like the perfect medium for "text" adventure games to have a resurgence.

I totally agree! I think this will be more true as we get better at natural language understanding. (coincidentally, this is my PhD research area)

There's still a lot of unsolved problems for making this kind of stuff usable. But we can dream, haha, and we're getting closer. I think the possibilities for games are actually much more impressive than most people imagine, right now.

Re: Source code for Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and other Infocom games

#145

Post by brlewis »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #137
bitforger wrote: post #136

Reminds me of that time I hacked together Zork for the Google Home. You can still try it out, I think, if you say "Ok, Google, let me talk to Dungeon RPG" https://github.com/mitchellgordon95/DungeonForGoogleHome

Oh, cool! I'd love for someone to make a more fully-baked version of this. Get some good audiobook narrators and voice actors, and add sound effects and stuff! Smart assistants, ironically, feel like the perfect medium for "text" adventure games to have a resurgence.

Yes, possibly for single-player interactive fiction. But kids these days spend a lot of time in multi-person text conversations, pointing to a MUD resurgence. Maybe we'll see both.

Re: Source code for Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and other Infocom games

#146

Post by brlewis »

jordanpg wrote: post #51

I love interactive fiction (as these types of games are now denoted) then and now. In principle. There are possibilities with the text-only canvas that are not even conceivable in other media. But really, does anyone have time for these games anymore? Playing these Infocom games is a multi-month project, with a significant amount of note-taking, manual mapping, and patience (read: replay) required. To call the "parse…

Do you have statistics on how much time people spend playing Candy Crush or other modern games? I think a lot of people have spent 70 hours watching Game of Thrones.

But if length is really a problem, making shorter versions wouldn't be hard.

Re: Source code for Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and other Infocom games

#147

Post by brlewis »

lispm wrote: post #133
WorldMaker wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's exactly a Lisp derivative/fork. Zork was originally written in MDL [0], a Lisp derivative in use on MIT's mainframes (that in turn went on to inspire parts of Scheme). When the Zork team left college to form Infocom, they built ZIL to port Zork to home computers, based on their experience of MDL, and their needs for their Z-Machine virtual machine. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDL_(programming_language)

> Scheme don't know. But Lisp Machine Lisp and then Common Lisp.

I've seen EQUAL? in some of the code snippets. I can believe that inspired Scheme predicates.

Re: Source code for Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and other Infocom games

#149

Post by philsnow »

djsumdog wrote: post #135
ballenf wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original King's Quest had a puzzle which required writing down the alphabet forwards and backwards to encode Rumplestitskin as the secret word needed to get the magic beans. (You could "win" the game without the beans but you'd miss out on a really cool portion of the game and your score was far from the max.) The in-game puzzle hint was far from helpful. I played the game for a year before getting a hint book. R…

Kings Quest V had TONS of instances where if you didn't react to a situation immediately, you'd lose an item that would be required later and you wouldn't realize it until you got stuck. (Throwing the fish at the bear or that shiny thing in the nest before the bird picks you up). KQ6 and 7 were setup so it was impossible to get stuck, but 5 was not. KQ3 had that annoying path you had to transverse and time limits unt…

The Monkey Island games were all set up to not allow fail states, so I was reasonably confident that my 8 and 10 year old kids could muddle through.

I had to come to their rescue a couple times since they didn't get the headhunters pamphlet puzzle because it's based on a pun, but other than that they loved the first game and I'm confident they'll be able to do the sequels.

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