Earlier quoted context omitted.
Much better to have the world disappear from the bag.
put bag in bag of "things which do not contain itself"
Russell's Paradox:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox
The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took 40 years to finish
21–30 of 46 posts
Re: The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took 40 years to finish
#22Nice job. I think it might be worth adding a few more verb synonyms to make the parser a little bit less strict - what's a few more years of development. :) Like many other devs I also dipped my feet in the world of interactive fiction. As a kid I was just learning about concepts such as inheritance / OOP / etc. so I went a bit overboard on the ontology. I remember pretty early on making a rather large mistake in tha…
Heh. I remember similarly spending a few hours inside LambdaMOO. Successfully managed to clone myself, put myself in my clone’s pocket, and then put my clone in my own pocket and kind of broke room reversal. It was only later I discovered this was an intentional mechanic/bug that some designers that used to create very, very difficult puzzles. Weird things happen when you give your MOO players a REPL in LISP land.
I once wrote an (Amylaar LPC) enemy who, if you attacked him and he was near death, would summon two comrades to fight for him.
Unfortunately, they're immediately hostile so you start attacking them too, and _they_ get near death and summon two comrades each, and so on. It turns into a Sorcerer's Apprentice scenario very quickly.
I managed to bring the MUD to a halt. An archwizard (not Yen Sid) had to instakill the enemies to avoid hitting their "near death" condition and creating more of them.
Re: The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took 40 years to finish
#23LLMs can enhance text adventures.
I'm not saying having LLMs narrate the entire situation. I'm saying have the LLM sit between gamestate and the player. The LLM is the UI.
Essentially the LLM can see the current game state and possible moves and it's the LLMs job to change the game state and report the current game state to the user (via a well written narrative).
That keeps the world consistent and structured, but the LLM adds enough dynamism to keep it flowing well. You can even make the underlying game state complex as well. Like you can have enemy AI's that actually move through the world too (independent of the LLM).
Re: The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took 40 years to finish
#24LLMs can enhance text adventures. I'm not saying having LLMs narrate the entire situation. I'm saying have the LLM sit between gamestate and the player. The LLM is the UI. Essentially the LLM can see the current game state and possible moves and it's the LLMs job to change the game state and report the current game state to the user (via a well written narrative). That keeps the world consistent and structured, but t…
There have been attempts, the results were not promising:
https://intfiction.org/t/first-full-game-available-on-new-ll...
Re: The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took 40 years to finish
#25LLMs can enhance text adventures. I'm not saying having LLMs narrate the entire situation. I'm saying have the LLM sit between gamestate and the player. The LLM is the UI. Essentially the LLM can see the current game state and possible moves and it's the LLMs job to change the game state and report the current game state to the user (via a well written narrative). That keeps the world consistent and structured, but t…
There have been attempts, the results were not promising: https://intfiction.org/t/first-full-game-available-on-new-ll...
It looks as if the problem for this one was a game design issue. They had the LLM be sarcastic and ignore well known adventure game prompts on purpose. It's an easy fix to make the LLM more obedient and polite.
The biggest issue is attempts to hack the LLM, to get at hidden gamestate. But I feel this can be easily remedied by just not providing the LLM with hidden game state.
Re: The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took 40 years to finish
#26Tangentially related, I remember reading about an ancient still being developed adventure game. It was from Eastern Europe (former Yugoslavia, I want to say) about being trapped in a prison that had crazy amounts of depth and consequences. One of them being something like picking up a random unused condom on the floor will result in the pregnancy of another character in a later chapter. I've searched for it again and can't find it, and I couldn't have dreamed it up.
Anyone know the game?
Re: The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took 40 years to finish
#27As a kid, the first text adventure I encountered with "The Cave" a text-choice game created by another student in the same town I lived. Our common teacher had created a "Computer Club" newsletter, to share programs between schools. Then at a junior college I encountered Adventure, Zork (the full version), Mystery Mansion, and Warp on an HP 3000/terminal mini-computer system. I began writing text adventures myself, b…
I know Adventure exists via homebrew on the Mac via the open-adventure package. There are a bunch of Z-machine options for Zork.
Re: The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took 40 years to finish
#28As a kid, the first text adventure I encountered with "The Cave" a text-choice game created by another student in the same town I lived. Our common teacher had created a "Computer Club" newsletter, to share programs between schools. Then at a junior college I encountered Adventure, Zork (the full version), Mystery Mansion, and Warp on an HP 3000/terminal mini-computer system. I began writing text adventures myself, b…
I had the same thing happen - lost my text adventure because it grew too large. That spurred me to figure out a better way of writing text adventures. I thought my solution of using a single parser and parallel array for game data was pretty innovative. I was 12 at the time and didn't have access to any magazines that had game source in them, so I didn't know any better.
Re: The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took 40 years to finish
#29This is amazing. Replace “Atari 800” with “TI 99/4a” (and the fact that he eventually finished the game) and you have the story of my early life as a programmer! Well done for shipping. That’s the hardest thing of all to do!
Re: The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took 40 years to finish
#30LLMs can enhance text adventures. I'm not saying having LLMs narrate the entire situation. I'm saying have the LLM sit between gamestate and the player. The LLM is the UI. Essentially the LLM can see the current game state and possible moves and it's the LLMs job to change the game state and report the current game state to the user (via a well written narrative). That keeps the world consistent and structured, but t…
Even Inform6 with the English library running under a Pentium would run circles over llm's. They aren't even close.
If7 will curb-stomp it.
NPC's running around were a thing even in the 80's, see The Hobbit. That on a ZX spectrum. 8 bit CPU, 48k of RAM. With if6 and Zmachine games for 16 bit and 32 bit computers in the 90's llm's can't even compete.
From Jigsaw, Anchorhead, Curses, Spider and Web to that anagram word puzzle game for Glulx (a 32 bit zmachine cousin), the array of amateur but professional looking games it's huge, really huge.