231–240 of 241 posts
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I have the oldest available Crowther version running using a DEC Fortran compiler. YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING . AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY.
I remember digging up these to run on simh https://jerz.setonhill.edu/intfic/colossal-cave-adventure-so... Do you have older ones?
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 stateme…
"Want some rye?" "'course ya do!"
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 stateme…
IMHO, Inform6 (which is a true object-oriented programming language) is much more powerful than Inform7. I tried both and found that: I7 is not consistent and often ambiguous: some pieces of code would get broken after inserting a perfectly valid "sentence" with no explanation; compilation is slow, execution is slow; some tiny compiled text games with no picture and no sound weight more than 5Mo. If I had a large pro…
That is, it isn't just an English-like syntax for writers who are used to writing in complete sentences... it's a programming model based on concepts from narrative, technical writing, and linguistics, for writers who are using it to write narratives, describe technical systems, and manipulate text.
I7 integrates high-level domain concepts of interactive fiction into the language: scenes and continuity, rules and their exceptions, relationships between objects, templates for parsing and printing text.
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A commenter on Zarf's blog ( https://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/all-of-infocoms-game-sourc... ) reports that ZILF is capable of at least building the Zork source to something that will start up, though given the warnings produced during compilation it's not going to work perfectly...
Looking at the code, it seems doable to make sense of it, one instruction at a time. For example this: "Would you like to restart the game from the beginning, restore a saved game position, or end this session of the game?| (Type RESTART, RESTORE, or QUIT):| >"> > ) ( ) (T )>) ( )>>> - Read user input, and put result in WRD - Switch statement on WRD - Case RESTART: Write Failed and restart - Case RESTORE: Write Ok an…
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Have you tried any of the modern games other than the two you linked ? A lot of the games being made right now are shorter and punchier than the classic infocom games. Suveh nux ( https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=xkai23ry99qdxce3 ) is a great example of a modern game that is short, interesting and uses the medium in an interesting manner.
Anchorhead, Jigsaw, Curses... aren't so short.
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I love how a tongue-in-cheek reply about the lack of syntax highlighting for ZIL files drew the attention of someone who actually implemented syntax highlighting for it. https://twitter.com/taradinoc/status/1118181848494985216
And now it's a PR. By a GitHub engineer even. https://github.com/github/linguist/pull/4497
Looks like GitHub will quickly have support for syntax highlighting of ZIL files. https://github.com/github/linguist/pull/4497