Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 241 posts

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

#161

Post by jiveturkey »

codingdave wrote: post #74
bredren wrote: post #37

Hitchhikers Guide was one of the first PC games I ever got. I had no idea it was a “text adventure.” Nor did I understand it was based on a book. My dad got it for me used from The Computer Club in downtown Lake Oswego, Oregon. I picked it out largely due to the green guy on the front of the box. I remember being delighted by all the weird stuff it came with, including a small packet of fuzz, and other artifacts from…

I loved it, too - really enjoyed the puzzles, and had gotten through most of the game as a kid. I never quite finished it, and found out later that there was a timing component whereby you had to make the tea and get to the exit while Marvin was in the right place, (or something like that), and if you missed the chance, it never told you the game was in an unwinnable state, so you could play forever. Nevertheless, I…

> timing component

wow. I also nearly finished but not quite. I bet most people got this far.

Now to burn the next 40-80 hours ...

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

#162

Post by aaaaaar »

philipodonnell wrote: post #21

> In general, Infocom games were created by taking previous Infocom source code, copying the directory, and making changes until the game worked the way the current Implementor needed. Structure, therefore, tended to follow from game to game and may or may not accurately reflect the actual function of the code. Some things never change... EDIT: this is how I do most of my personal projects!

I wonder if that's how they developed Cornerstone.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_%28software%29

Just rip some code out here, change some there, until it looks like a relational database :)

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

#163

Post by philsnow »

radley wrote: post #138
djsumdog wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really the problem with the entire early genre of adventure games. The later Sierra titles were terrible about this. You pretty much needed the hint book to beat many of them. Even after they dropped text for point-n-click, the puzzles were still hard and not really intuitive. The later LucasArts games were better at this (I bit The Dig without any hints; think I needed one or two for Full Throttle). The mode…

I was able to solve almost everything in Zork except the bell, book, & candle puzzle. I only discovered the answer a couple of years later when they revealed the solution in the Zork books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork_books I finished the game after that.

I had no idea the "bell, book, and candle" in Nethack were from Zork. I gathered that it was from _something_ (since nearly everything else in it is) but didn't know what.

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

#164

Post by aaaaaar »

egypturnash wrote: post #116
jackhack wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slowly? the iPhone is many thousands of times more capable than any of the target systems these software were built for -- typical was a 1 megahertz 8-bit CPU with 32 kilobytes of RAM. Even the most inefficient ZIL interpreter will spend most of its time in a stall loop.

I think “play slowly” in this case means “take it out during odd moments of the day such as waiting in a line or riding a bus and poke at the puzzles instead of catching up on Twitter”. I am pretty sure that even a first-generation ZIL interpreter spent the bulk of its cycles flashing the cursor and waiting for the player to type something.

I thought "slowly" was a reference to the reduced typing speed on the phone.

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

#167

Post by showdead »

philsnow wrote: post #163
radley wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was able to solve almost everything in Zork except the bell, book, & candle puzzle. I only discovered the answer a couple of years later when they revealed the solution in the Zork books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork_books I finished the game after that.

I had no idea the "bell, book, and candle" in Nethack were from Zork. I gathered that it was from _something_ (since nearly everything else in it is) but didn't know what.

It is much older than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell,_book,_and_candle

I believe in contemporary use it has become associated with witches, and I have seen it used as a general "occult" reference.

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

#168

Post by Bartweiss »

ThorinJacobs wrote: post #113
Bartweiss wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other responses about difficult Infocom games are all accurate, but it's worth noting that Hitchhiker's Guide in particular played this as comedy . There were genuinely tough puzzles, but there were also lots of elements which essentially pulled the rug out from under the player to amuse them with unreasonable demands. Broadly, the game didn't feel as fundamentally hard as many of its contemporaries. Instead, it…

+1 - Another great example of difficult games as parody is I Wanna Be The Guy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Wanna_Be_the_Guy ). Take all the existing conventions and stereotypes of difficult platform games and exaggerate them to the extreme.

IWBTG is another great example, definitely. And almost the exact same type of classic-NES parody, where Mario:Syobon::Metroid:IWBTG.

Thinking about it a little more, this pattern seems to describe an entire class of games, including non-parodies. Dark Souls is famously hard because of sheer mechanical difficulty, certainly. But it's also rife with learnable, low-threat moments like "when you walk up this staircase, a boulder will fall on you from offscreen". They don't alter the overall difficulty too much, but they clearly convey that the game isn't honoring standard design principles about giving the player a "fair chance". In an odd way, it makes later departures like "the illusory wall doesn't have anything marking its location" feel more justified.

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

#169

Post by johnmw »

If you have an interest in odd programming languages, the 'spiritual successor' to these games written in the Infocom ZIL language would be Inform7.

I think it is quite a fascinating declarative language that reads much like English, for example:

The same division between creating things, and laying down rules, is visible in Inform source text. The creation of the world is done by making unconditional factual statements about it. For example,

  The wood-slatted crate is in the Gazebo. The crate is a container.
More info: http://inform7.com/learn/man/WI_2_1.html

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

#170

Post by magduf »

duskwuff wrote: post #141
magduf wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 sur…

Very interesting, and better than I would have expected (as in, that's a lower compression rate than I would have expected).

I wonder how gzip and xz do with Super Mario Bros. and other NES games though.

Post reply on HN