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A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

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Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

#41
post #40

I 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…

Presumably it's similar to Soda Drinker Pro, which is 102 rooms, each with terrible MS paint drawings, in which you drink a soda and walk around for a minute or two.

https://youtu.be/C40kq29Emn0

Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

#42
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In what way do those imperfections make something like cutlery inferior?

Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

#43
post #40

I 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…

Even if it’s only 1 sentence per room (it’s not), that’s still 4000 sentences. I’d guess this is at least a few hundred pages of written work (without downloading it and just based on what you’ve shared). That seems pretty substantial to me.

Not sure what the length has to do with handcraftedness though. This comment is handcrafted even if it is short.

Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

#44
post #11

The 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.…

I got into coding at home when I realized ctrl-break gave me a BASIC command prompt on my Apple //c. It was really cool, and I spent a lot of time learning to code. There was one small problem: doing so on startup meant I didn't get a DOS. In other words, every program I wrote like that meant I couldn't keep it.

I eventually learned to get a ProDOS disk setup, and save my work, but it was still fun.

Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

#45
post #10

Give your preferred AI agent internet search powers and look up how Elite managed to cram rather a lot of game into a nominal 64KB on a C64 or 32KB on a BBC model B. That's a first person 3D space craft simulation with a very impressive Heads Up Display with vector graphics (unfilled on BBC and C64, filled on PC). It is also a commodity trading game to improve your spaceship etc and with a massive amount of variety i…

Also reminds me of how they fit Pitfall into 4k. A lot simpler game but the platform was also much more limited. This is a great talk for those who love such things:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MBT1OK6VAIU

Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

#46
A text adventure of all things seems like it’d be great for AI though. You could have natural open ended conversations with NPCs to learn whatever they can tell you about the world, for example. This is one area where human generated content isn’t really better, you’d just end up with boring dialog trees to traverse.

Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

#47
post #11

The 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 t…

I used to mess with sound on my commodore 64. 3 voices. ASDR. Square, sine, triangle. Chords were frequencies with common factors. The world of strange sounds is vast.

Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

#48
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It won’t always be inferior. Some items are just not profitable or too bespoke for mass production.

Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

#49

Looking 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

Yeah, I imagine “hand-coded” will be a common phrase on a lot of repos soon

Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

#50

A text adventure of all things seems like it’d be great for AI though. You could have natural open ended conversations with NPCs to learn whatever they can tell you about the world, for example. This is one area where human generated content isn’t really better, you’d just end up with boring dialog trees to traverse.

AI Dungeon was an open-ended interactive fiction game powered by GPT-2 that went viral back in 2019.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Dungeon

Where AI has the power to shine isn't necessarily in the creation of novel stories, but in the capacity to act as a significantly more powerful and flexible text parser for player input.

Get ye flask and all that...

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