A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by ianbicking » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 1:24 AM UTC

bsammon wrote: post #107

vunderba wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because it's not written in QBasic. It's written in a variant of QBasic called QB64 [1] - a spiritual successor to Microsoft's QBasic intended to run on modern 64-bit machines. I went over the BAS source the last time this was posted a few weeks back and it has a lot of keywords that are specific to QB64 so unfortunately you can't run this on a true DOS machine (or DosBox). [1] https://qb64.com

However, it should be playable on Linux or OSX, both of which are (reportedly) supported by QB64.

I did give it a try, but no luck; qb64 seems to only run the code by compiling it via C++, and that failed on my system. (And I don't have the determination to try to find out why.)

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

#112

Post by quuxplusone » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 3:02 AM UTC

fasbiner wrote: post #110

quuxplusone wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Emily Short blog post is a good read, but I didn't find that it helped me learn what is "the horseshoe theory of AI generation" nor in what sense handcrafting should end up close to procgen or anything else. Can you elaborate and/or point to something that does?

1) left horseshoe prong (prolific handcrafted quantity is quality): "4000 handcrafted unique rooms made by one person" that are all fundamentally the same in terms of non-consequential interactivity. Ie, the quality is extremely low compared to what you can actually do even with QBasic! Online, almost nobody is actually going to crack open the interactions.txt file. Instead, the conversation is about the idea of it b…

Ah, okay, I buy that theory (especially in its incarnation as handcrafted earrings at craft fairs). I recognize the examples of robot coffee (or pizza) and handmade crafts as "genera" with an unfortunately large number of examples/species in the real world.

But I still fail to recognize the OP's 4000-room game as a species of any recognizable "genus" of similar games/products. I'm not saying it seems good, I'm just saying it seems pretty sui generis to me. Maybe I don't play enough bad handmade games. :)

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

#113

Post by eru » Sun, Oct 19, 2025, 11:56 PM UTC

defrost wrote: post #80

fennecbutt wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Handmade cutlery is an artistic work. Machine made cutlery is an artistic work. Remember, the benchmark for art is a banana taped to a wall.

the benchmark for art is the first banana taped to a wall.

I don't think there's any evidence that the famous banana was the first one to be taped to a wall.

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

#114

Post by stevengoodwin » Sat, Oct 25, 2025, 2:10 PM UTC

vunderba wrote: post #24

helpfulclippy wrote: post #16

I’m surprised to see a QBasic game with 1GHz CPU and 512MB RAM required! Is that because the game needs it, or because that’s what it takes to even run a modern OS with dosbox or something?

It's because it's not written in QBasic. It's written in a variant of QBasic called QB64 [1] - a spiritual successor to Microsoft's QBasic intended to run on modern 64-bit machines. I went over the BAS source the last time this was posted a few weeks back and it has a lot of keywords that are specific to QB64 so unfortunately you can't run this on a true DOS machine (or DosBox). [1] https://qb64.com

Worked second time for me (on Mint)

The first time it barfed was because there was a space in the filename, and the QB64 editor didn't handle it. Running on the command line, with quotes around the name, was flawless.