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Microsoft makes Zork open-source

opensource.microsoft.com

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Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#181

Post by m463 »

ndiddy wrote: post #139
bluedino wrote: post #18

I've seen a few things called 'Zork source code' in various places over the years (even on a CD that came with a game programming book of some sort), and copies like this: https://github.com/MITDDC/zork What's the lineage here?

Zork was originally a public-domain mainframe game called Dungeon developed at MIT. Its authors founded Infocom, split the game into 3 pieces, added more content, and released it for microcomputers as the 3 Zork games. The source code that's been floating around since the 80s is for the original Dungeon game. Between the early 80s and the early 90s, the source was translated from MDL to DEC FORTRAN to Unix f77 to C,…

I played it as dungeon on a dec vax, probably using a vt100.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#183

Post by msla »

dboreham wrote: post #60
fsckboy wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MDL was a dialect of lisp invented by/in part/under Sussman, the originator of Scheme and SICP; what you're calling an obscure dialect was was part of the continuum of a research trajectory, one of a number of experimental languages designed to test out ideas. Sussman got his PhD in 1973 so we're talking about his later work as a student/early work as a postdoc/assistant professor, and Abelson was in the same timefra…

Was go to say - MIT, dec-10: probably not obscure.

PDP-10, rather.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#185

Post by monkeywork »

NecroTechno wrote: post #182

it's pretty grim that this announcement, which is in part celebrating the legacy of an incredible artistic endeavor, was written by an LLM. reading this feels like my head is continuously being bashed in by a brick.

Where do you get that the announcement was written by an LLM - they list the authors of the article on the page.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#186

Post by bumblehean »

monkeywork wrote: post #185
NecroTechno wrote: post #182

it's pretty grim that this announcement, which is in part celebrating the legacy of an incredible artistic endeavor, was written by an LLM. reading this feels like my head is continuously being bashed in by a brick.

Where do you get that the announcement was written by an LLM - they list the authors of the article on the page.

"When Zork arrived, it didn’t just ask players to win; it asked them to imagine"

Literally the first sentence.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#188

Post by thesh4d0w »

johnisgood wrote: post #102
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> along with ignoring all the modern Windows and Office piracy tools which are also on GitHub You weren't going to buy it anyway. No-one cares about you. Pirate it if you like. Take your warezed copy of Office Home Edition and be blessed, no-one is going to miss your 120 bucks. An organisation with maybe 100,000 users each paying a per-seat licence? Yeah, that's the sale they want. Not your one-off copy.

Yup, they will care when a huge % of people start doing it.

If so they would have kicked this off github - https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts

157k stars

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#190

Post by Nevermark »

drob518 wrote: post #125
chihuahua wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 1980s, I was interested in text adventure games, and had a kind of book/magazine on the topic of how to write them. In BASIC, obviously (groan) because that's what was easily accessible back then. I remember figuring out the mechanisms that the book introduced: what kind of rudimentary data structures to use to represent the state of the world, the locations of objects, etc. I got some simple stuff to work, yo…

Nice. Yep, we wrote our own adventure games in BASIC as well. There were a couple problems with that, however. First we weren’t able to come up with a sophisticated parser like Infocom had. We ended up with basic “verb object” parsers, ala Scott Adams adventures. Second, we didn’t have many rooms as it was difficult to fit it all into memory and we didn’t have the sophisticated incremental loading that Infocom did wi…

I iterated on adventure games from junior high into high school, starting with a TRS-80 Model III.

I created parser recursion in BASIC (without a stack or a then non-existent GOSUB), using a string as the stack, including a character as a return destination (i.e. a flag for conditional GOTOs).

I was so proud of my parser!

A wrote many great unfinished games. I was more interested in better coding than completion, but the games still had a lot of color.

One Easter egg was if you typed “sh*t” the response was: “YOU HAVE DROPPED THE DUNG”.” You could do that anywhere, so a great way to detect you had walked in a circle in a maze or forest.

Later I used strings as a heap to define very simple 3D vector geometry.

(In early MATLAB, I prototyped some code with tree data structures implemented with an array, before they introduced their structures. The latter code shipped.)

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