Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams

madned.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 196 posts

Re: The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams

#171

Post by DonHopkins »

gorbex wrote: post #166
DonHopkins wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wonderful to see the GOOD Scott Adams here on Hacker News! I can still crisply remember the places and frames of mind I was in while walking around and solving puzzles in your worlds. How do you think Adventure games are like the Method of Loci, or Memory Palaces, in that they can help you remember and retrieve vast amounts of information geographically? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci What do you t…

It strikes me as kind of a bummer that I'm not aware of anybody making a shell that functions as a MUD-like text interface. I suppose directions would get very monotonous and negate some of the implementation. . .

The file system and namespace could be like a sprawling map of rooms containing objects that could contain other objects, instead of a strictly hierarchical tree.

Re: The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams

#172

Post by framsberg »

anthk wrote: post #149
PaulHoule wrote: post #54

Scott Adams wrote a simple interpreter which could be implemented in BASIC or Assembly Language for his games. https://6502disassembly.com/a2-scott-adams/interp.html This was like the Infocom interpreter (e.g. "Zork") but more specialized to writing games.

The Z-Machine was made for games, too. And the then new Inform6 game was basically literal OOP with rooms, objects and people, thus making an adventure can be done in really trivial ways. If you read up Inform's Beginner Guide you'll get amazed of how the Inform6 library handles lots of stuff for you. Lots of verbs and objects types are already implemented, so you can set a game "room" for example in just four words…

Nowadays there's also PunyInform, an Inform 6 library that replaces the standard library. Programming for it is very similar, but the resulting games are much smaller and faster, to work well on 8-bit computers. https://github.com/johanberntsson/PunyInform

There's currently a jam going on. Three PunyInform games have been released, and anyone can play and judge them at https://itch.io/jam/punyjam-2/entries . One of the games (Opportunity) comes with source code too, so you can see how it works, if you're interested.

Re: The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams

#173

Post by framsberg »

seanwilson wrote: post #160
anthk wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of IF games have puzzless very different from the ones from the graphical adventures as the text medium can set really complex interactions. Check out All Things Devour and Vicious Cycles, both have time travel mechanics.

> Most of IF games have puzzless very different from the ones from the graphical adventures as the text medium can set really complex interactions. I used to think this but do you think most text adventures wouldn't work as graphical adventures? Most text adventure puzzles I see are "USE X ON Y" (or the verb required is obvious), nothing complex, the same as graphical adventures. I think All Things Devours would work…

How about The Edifice, which won the XYZZY Award for Best Puzzles and for Best Individual Puzzle?

https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=4tb9soabrb4apqzd

The puzzle that won it the Best Individual Puzzle award in one where you need to learn enough of a foreign (invented) language to ask a person for critical information.

Re: The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams

#174

Post by ScottAdams »

thereare5lights wrote: post #170
ScottAdams wrote: post #3

Hi all this is Scott Adams. I am open for an AMA (Ask Me Anything), awaiting your comments!

What's it like to share a name with the comic?

It's been interesting. I have a personal sig that reads:

Not Dilbert, Adventure! Say yoho and everything spins around and suddenly I'm elsewhere...

Re: The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams

#175

Post by ScottAdams »

DonHopkins wrote: post #152
ScottAdams wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really good question! I was working on a TRS-80 Level II machine (this was a model 1 before there wer models). It was my first home appliance computer, before that I had homebrews. It came with Microsoft Basic. I had only used tiny basic up until then and wanted to play with strings. It sounded neat to be able to manipulate language with them. I wrote a game language, a compiler for the language, and an interpreter f…

Oh yeah, the TRS-80 Level II was much fancier and more powerful than the Level I, by far! Level I BASIC was pretty cheesy. Good call. ;) I bet you even had an Expansion Interface, huh?

I did indeed. I had one of the earliest expansion interfaces and disk drive. It had severe noise on the bus cable which caused no end of problems! They finally came out with a field service repair for it.

Re: The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams

#176

Post by ScottAdams »

BashiBazouk wrote: post #165

I wonder if I have played one of his games. When I was a preteen the adults in the house I lived in took a three week computer course. For the period of the course, my friend and I had access to a Commodore Pet. There was a text adventure that was kind of DnDish. A game we had recently started to play. We went through the text adventure then started to look at and play with the code changing all text to something muc…

It is possible. Adventureland was available for the Pet as was Pirate Adventure.

Re: The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams

#178

Post by ScottAdams »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #164
DonHopkins wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah, the TRS-80 Level II was much fancier and more powerful than the Level I, by far! Level I BASIC was pretty cheesy. Good call. ;) I bet you even had an Expansion Interface, huh?

This is giving me childhood flashbacks at this point. I did indeed have a Model I TRS-80 with an Expansion Interface, albeit LNW's third-party one. And I remember typing in the BASIC version of "Adventureland" from Captain 80's Book of Basic Adventures -- which was in the news again recently, crazily enough, due to former whiz kid TRS-80 programmer and later columnist/editor Harry McCracken finding and fixing a typo…

Yes the Bob Lidil book was very special. I also saw the conversation on Harry's old game. That was a fascinating story. Amazing after all these years.

Re: The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams

#179

Post by ScottAdams »

mypalmike wrote: post #158
ScottAdams wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes those were all terms I used in my game! I loved reading and had a good vocubulary that I liked to use when it seemed appropriate :) I am happy you have such good memories of my classic games! Have you tried any of my new ones?

I have to admit I haven't, but since you're asking nicely, I will look into them. Cheers! :-)

Please let me know what you think about them feedback@clopas.net

Re: The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams

#180

Post by seanwilson »

framsberg wrote: post #173
seanwilson wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of IF games have puzzless very different from the ones from the graphical adventures as the text medium can set really complex interactions. I used to think this but do you think most text adventures wouldn't work as graphical adventures? Most text adventure puzzles I see are "USE X ON Y" (or the verb required is obvious), nothing complex, the same as graphical adventures. I think All Things Devours would work…

How about The Edifice, which won the XYZZY Award for Best Puzzles and for Best Individual Puzzle? https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=4tb9soabrb4apqzd The puzzle that won it the Best Individual Puzzle award in one where you need to learn enough of a foreign (invented) language to ask a person for critical information.

This seems like another one that has to include a unique mechanic on top of common object manipulation to make the latter more interesting? I'll look at it more closely though.

I know of https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=aearuuxv83plclpl and https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=w5s3sv43s3p98v45 that use language and wordplay as well.

Post reply on HN