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1977: Zork

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Re: 1977: Zork

#41

Post by pmiller2 »

VadimPR wrote: post #29

If you'd like to dig further, online text games (MUDs) are still around. https://mudlet.org is a nice modern client for playing them! (bias: I'm the project lead)

I have not played MUDs in a long time, but, when I did, I always just got by with Tintin++. I never went all the way and wrote an actual bot that could run unattended, because there were so many different things that could really mess up your bot, or, at least cause it to act impolite, that it looked like more trouble than it was worth. Also, I wasn't that great at scripting with tt++. :P I was, however, (literally) a wizard with LPC.

Re: 1977: Zork

#42

Post by germinalphrase »

pmiller2 wrote: post #39
germinalphrase wrote: post #36

Has anyone built a CYOA based on verbal input? Is there an available toolset with which to do so?

You could do that with whatever interactive fiction tools you want, combined with some form of speech to text software. For instance, Inform 7 for your IF tool, and any of the following for speech to text: https://www.lifewire.com/state-of-linux-voice-recognition-22... That said, I'm not sure how good any of those speech to text tools actually are, so, this might be kind of a pipe dream at the moment. Also, I know yo…

Thanks. It really is the voice to text that is the concern. I noodled around with an interactive fiction game concept a while back focused on a nuclear showdown.

I wanted to build it into an red analog telephone. The phone would ring and you would hear a message from various government/military types.

As tensions rise, the phone rings more often, possibly multiple lines light up forcing you to catch/miss vital information or opportunities.

Inevitably, things go pear-shaped and you try to (prevent?) a first strike/retaliatory strike.

Truthfully, I don’t have the skills to build the device, but plotting out the narrative, writing the dialogue would be fun.

Re: 1977: Zork

#43

Post by tomku »

blackrock wrote: post #34

> You are in an open field west of a big white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. This reminds me of that hypnotic phrase from the 12 Monkeys tv series. Anyways, whatever happened to these types of games? Did it just die out as computers got more powerful, and everyone just played first-person shooters or 3d role playing games?

There are still people making new works of interactive fiction, including in the parser-based style of Adventure or Zork. You can find a lot of the more recent games on IFDB[0] and general info about IF and the community on IFWiki[1]. Most modern parser games are built for VMs with interpreters available for many operating systems and types of devices, with Lectrote[2] being a common recommendation for desktop platforms.

[0]: https://ifdb.tads.org

[1]: http://ifwiki.org/index.php/Main_Page

[2]: https://github.com/erkyrath/lectrote

Re: 1977: Zork

#44

Post by daniel5151 »

One of the coolest technical aspects of early Infocom text adventure games is that most games weren't actually written using native assembly code for the platforms they ran on, and were instead compiled down to "z-code", a bytecode which ran on the "z-machine" virtual machine architecture. Z-machines are pretty niftly little bits of tech, as while they have a lot in common with regular 'ol machine code, the z-machine spec also includes dedicated instructions for fetching text input from the user, outputting text to the console, saving/loading data to disk, etc...

Having games target the abstract z-machine platform made it incredibly easy for Infocom to port games across platforms, as instead of re-writing every game from scratch, they could simply write a z-machine interpreter for said platform, and immediately gain access to their entire adventure game catalog!

A happy side-effect of all this is that it's super easy to run these classic adventure games on modern platforms, as instead of emulating the UI/UX of a 80s microcomputer, it's possible to write a z-machine interpreter that takes full advantage of modern GUIs.

One of my personal favorite modern z-machine interpreters is `encrusted` [1], which is written in Rust that runs on the Web thanks to WebAssembly. As a fun side-project, I ended up forking the project and making `embcrusted` [2], a z-machine interpreter that can run on embedded platforms without a full C-library. In a weekend or two of hacking, I was able to port a z-machine interpreter to my mechanical keyboard, in order to get the "authentic" experience of playing a text-adventure game through a teletype :)

[1] https://github.com/DeMille/encrusted

[2] https://github.com/daniel5151/embcrusted

Re: 1977: Zork

#45

Post by slices »

jansan wrote: post #15
the_af wrote: post #2

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. and It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue. are such iconic phrases, they bring a ton of good memories to my mind. And I never even finished Zork or Adventure!

I was late for Zork and only played "Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy" with friends. This essential command I will always remember: Take tea and no tea

So that's the solution!

That was one of life's greatest unsolved mysteries for me. The hours I spent trying to figure that out...

Re: 1977: Zork

#46

Post by sethammons »

my favorite thing I did on zork so many moons ago was something very much like:

  > kill self
    with what?
  > self
    sorry, you do not have the you
I will forever remember that I do not have the you.

Re: 1977: Zork

#47

Post by samizdis »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #10
throwaway123x2 wrote: post #3

Does anyone know of tools to make very basic text games and publish them to the web... like Choose Your Own Adventure type stories?

The tool to publish a Choose Your Own Adventure story to the web is just HTML. You have passages of text that link to other passages of text.

You can also use Google Forms, and embed those within Google Sites. I've been doing this to create media training exercises for interviewing techniques, and they've been popular with the journalism students.

Re: 1977: Zork

#49

Post by Ciph »

aurelius12 wrote: post #35
VadimPR wrote: post #29

If you'd like to dig further, online text games (MUDs) are still around. https://mudlet.org is a nice modern client for playing them! (bias: I'm the project lead)

Hi Vadi! Sarapis here. ;) He's right, Mudlet is the best desktop client out there for Mudding with. This is the part where I mention that I run a company with five MUDs ranging from almost 24 years live to just a couple years live. https://ironrealms.com

I used to be a cat-like dual wielding rapier knight with totem-skills, had a lot of fun with my old guild until the RP requirements were dropped. Still z thank you and the rest of the gang fort giving me so much fun and be able to meet so many nice people. I'm sure my character (Shearr) is still gathering dust somewhere :-)

Re: 1977: Zork

#50

Post by not2b »

I played Zork via the Arpanet in 1978. (Yes, I'm "experienced"). A friend showed me how to reach the net via a local phone call, even though we were in a school computer lab Washington, DC and were accessing a machine at MIT. We had a 300 baud modem and a DECwriter terminal; we wasted a lot of paper playing the game.
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