Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI, or press release
I guess part of what's annoying about LLMs is that they write like press releases.
And like Americans.
A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI
31–40 of 114 posts
Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI
#32Looking forward to most posts having “No AI” tagged on. Definitely a huge plus.
This makes me wonder if there will be a time when "No AI" will be considered up-scale (of sorts) like hand-sewn clothes or artisan bread
And, of course, it will be inferior to what the machines make.
Just like machine created cutlery is essentially perfect, but human smithed cutlery will have lots of small imperfections.
Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI
#33The first program I ever wrote was a choose your own adventure, I think written on my family’s IBM PC jr in Basic. It’s pretty amazing how far a kid can get with GOTO statements and a lot of patience. But for some reason I couldn’t (or didn’t know how to) save it, so I’d work on it all day, have my sister and mom play it, and then shut off the computer thus losing my days work. Or at least, that’s how I remember it.…
When I was first introduced to BASIC in elementary school, I was spending a lazy afternoon reading in the built-in QBasic docs (being able to hit F1 and get immediate help is still one of the coolest things ever IMHO) about the SOUND keyword, which let you set a frequency and duration.
I remember irritating the hell out of my parents (and our dog) with it until one day, by accident, I noticed they couldn’t hear the tone anymore. The frequency was somewhere in the range of 15-20 kHz IIRC.
So I wrote a “PASSWORD.BAS” source that would play that high pitched sound in short, one-tick intervals continuously while polling the keyboard for input but then stop after a random amount of time. To authenticate, the user had to hit the spacebar within a one second window of the sound’s termination. Hitting the spacebar too early would also result in access denied. Fun times!
Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI
#34If you are trying to beat the record for “most rooms in a text adventure”, I’m afraid you’ve got a long way to go - Level 9’s Snowball has more than 7k rooms.
IIRC, AvatarMUD (avatar.outland.org) has 20,000+ rooms in it. It's been a long time since I played, but it's absolutely massive!
Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI
#35[dead]
Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI
#36The first program I ever wrote was a choose your own adventure, I think written on my family’s IBM PC jr in Basic. It’s pretty amazing how far a kid can get with GOTO statements and a lot of patience. But for some reason I couldn’t (or didn’t know how to) save it, so I’d work on it all day, have my sister and mom play it, and then shut off the computer thus losing my days work. Or at least, that’s how I remember it.…
When I was in Jr. High, we had an Atari 400. Mostly I used it to play Missile Command and Star Raiders, but it also came with a BASIC cartridge.
In the back of the manual were four BASIC programs. The first three were very simple, stuff like a loop that prints your name 10 times and then exits.
The last program balanced your checkbook. It was 4 pages long. I laboriously typed it in, hunt-and-peck style, which took hours... then I hit "run".
Nothing.
I couldn't debug it. Not only did I not really understand software, I didn't have a checkbook — hell I didn't even know what "balance your checkbook" meant.
We didn't have the exorbitantly expensive Atari floppy disk drive, nor the cassette drive, so I couldn't save my work. Still, I left that BASIC cartridge in there for several days, foregoing my games, because I didn't want to lose my investment.
Eventually, I turned off the computer and the program disappeared forever.
I didn't program again for 20 years.
Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI
#37Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI
#38When I was in my first year of junior high they had formal dances. But for the (cooler) nerdy kids with no dates they opened up the computer room. One of the older kids had a big floppy he brought from home. On it he had a simple QBasic RPG. If you ran into an enemy it would start an RPG battle and all the graphics were made from 2D arrays. It was awesome! It blew my mind and I spent the rest of the year learning and building my own. Great times! Thanks!
Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI
#39The first program I ever wrote was a choose your own adventure, I think written on my family’s IBM PC jr in Basic. It’s pretty amazing how far a kid can get with GOTO statements and a lot of patience. But for some reason I couldn’t (or didn’t know how to) save it, so I’d work on it all day, have my sister and mom play it, and then shut off the computer thus losing my days work. Or at least, that’s how I remember it.…
Similar background here. The public library had Apple II machines and I became quite enamored with making proto-text adventures in Applesoft BASIC. Because you had to sign-up for time I wrote a lot of my programs longhand on nth generation photocopies of "program template" sheets that they handed out at the library (lined paper with columns for line numbers, statements, comments, etc). The spaghetti code was astoundi…
By the time I was a kid, most of the x86 computers I was exposed to were running DOS with the included QBasic IDE so I never had to worry about things like this.
However, we had old stacks of Compute magazine [1] lying around with BASIC source games printed out - and I remember initially being confused as to why all the line numbers were separated by intervals of 10...
Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI
#40I downloaded the rooms.txt file and the word "handcrafted" is doing some heavy lifting. It's like one sentence per room. Did I miss something? I don't want to play the game (I hate text adventures), but I want an idea of how much effort went into this.
Example:
--ROOM 22 START-- Village of Oathmoor 23,0,0,21 You find yourself in a narrow, dimly lit alley. An ELDERLY WOMAN sits perched on a broken stool, her piercing gaze fixed on you with an unsettling intensity. --ROOM 22 END-- --ROOM 23 START-- Village of Oathmoor 24,22,0,0 The road ahead begins to slope gently upward, winding its way past abandoned, barren buildings whose windows gape like empty eyes. --ROOM 23 END-- --ROOM 24 START-- Village of Oathmoor 0,23,25,0 The eerie stillness around you is oppressive, broken only by the creeping sensation of unseen eyes upon you. A chill snakes down your spine. --ROOM 24 END-- --ROOM 25 START-- Village of Oathmoor 26,0,0,24 A faint melody drifts toward you, its haunting notes carried on the breeze. The aroma of a meal cooking over a distant fire stirs both hunger and curiosity. --ROOM 25 END-- --ROOM 26 START-- Village of Oathmoor 27,25,0,0 You stumble upon a makeshift camp where people dance in defiance of their sorrows. The leader of this ragtag group locks eyes with you, their expression unreadable. --ROOM 26 END--