I like playing Zork via docker: https://github.com/clockworksoul/docker-zork1 > docker run -it clockworksoul/zork1
Somebody uses it! Yay! You made my day
With Z2 and Z3 now released, will you make containers for those too?
Microsoft makes Zork open-source
201–210 of 256 posts
Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source
#202How did Microsoft get to own it in the first place? And the original MDL version of Zork has been around forever. I wonder if Microsoft has any of the other Infocom games and might release them too. And, "A game that changed how we think about play"? Um, that was ADVENTURE. Zork was arguably better, but it was in the same vein, and later.
> How did Microsoft get to own it in the first place?
Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source
#203Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somebody uses it! Yay! You made my day
With Z2 and Z3 now released, will you make containers for those too?
Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source
#205Reads like ChatGPT wrote it.
Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
When I was around six years old, my older brothers convinced me computer games were written in paragraph form. I wrote a lot of games! Asteroids went something like this, "You fly around in a ship that is a triangle. When you shoot asteroids they break up into smaller asteroids." My brothers got a lot of laughs out of those "programs". Fast-forward 45 years and whose laughing now?! :)
If you had gotten a patent on vibe coding, you'd be laughing now.
Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Wrote a mini adventure game in BASIC for the ZX-81. Since it only had 1K of RAM, each room in the game had to be a separate program (max around 25 lines of code or so), and at the end of the room, depending on what actions you took, it asked you to wind the cassette tape to a specific location to load a new room. When I could finally afford the 16K RAM pack, I rewrote it as a single application. Couldn't believe how…
> it asked you to wind the cassette tape to a specific location to load a new room.
Wow, that's dedication!
I wrote my own adventure game for my Commodore PET, which had 8K of RAM. It worked well, but after three rooms of content, I ran out of RAM, so then I gave up.
Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source
#208it'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. There were no graphics, no joystick, and no soundtrack, only words on a screen and the player’s curiosity. Yet those words built worlds more vivid than most games of their time. What made that possible wasn’t just clever writing, it was clever engineering.
Check out wikipedia's "signs of ai generated writing". Every sentence here is represented in that post. "Not just x, but y." "No x, no y, no x, just abc". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is about the fourth article I've read that mentions Lisp today on here. Okay, I get it. Lisp is great. Where should I start? It wasn't like I was planning on doing anything else at work next week...
Everyone's recommending books; I'm going to do the opposite and recommend a specific dialect. Install Clojure. Read https://clojure.org/guides/getting_started and choose an editor. If you don't have a favorite editor, I recommend NeoVim with the LazyVim package (clone https://github.com/LazyVim/starter and follow instructions), then run the :LazyExtras command and install the Clojure package. If you haven't used Lazy…
I should mention that you really do want good editor support with any dialect of Lisp, because having to balance parentheses by hand gets old fast. You want an editor where you can have keybindings for "pull this space-delimited item out of the current parentheses and stick it into the parent set of parentheses" and all the other operations that are extremely common in Lisp. Also, smart auto-indenting is absolutely essential in order to produce readable Lisp code. You need things lined up correctly if you want to be able to read the code without resorting to counting closing parens. This is why so many people use Emacs, because it was designed for Lisp from the ground up. But I never liked its Ctrl+Shift+Meta+key shortcut methods, hence why I'm recommending Vim.
Emacs does have one advantage over Vim when it comes to Lisp, though, which is that it almost certainly comes with Lisp-related keybindings already ready to go. And also that its config files are written in Lisp, so if you're using Emacs then you're already reading and writing Lisp code just to configure it. Two. Two advantages. Oh, and fanatical devotion to the Pope ^W^W Richard Stallman. Three advantages... I'll come in again.
Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source
#210[deleted]