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The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took 40 years to finish

scottandrew.com

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Re: The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took 40 years to finish

#41

Post by ninetyninenine »

anthk wrote: post #37
ninetyninenine wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? The LLM is in agentic mode and pulling and pushing the switches of the game. I don't see how these engines can curb stomp it.

The i6 and i7 languages have a guaranted internal consistency starting with grammar. Even if6 ('old' compared against i7) it's an incredible language targetting the Z Machine with a really easy OOP architecture to design your games. LLM's often lose the internal storyline on bizarre ways. An Inform 6 compiler can run under DOS/386 or Linux/BSD for 486 and compile a really large and functional game in seconds. For Inf…

That’s not my proposal. The LLM doesn’t run the world. It is simply the interface. It tells you the state of the game and tries to enhance the description. The game is a separate application and the LLM is simply an agentic layer between you and the actual game.

Re: The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took 40 years to finish

#42

Post by kqr »

I took an hour or so out of my day to finish this game and review it on ifdb.org. It was a very pleasant experience, barring the large amount of unimplemented scenery. I would have hoped for a slightly more vivid world and not just a backdrop for puzzles!

Thanks for sharing. Very intriguing collaboration between child-author and adult-author.

Re: The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took 40 years to finish

#43

Post by anthk »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #41
anthk wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The i6 and i7 languages have a guaranted internal consistency starting with grammar. Even if6 ('old' compared against i7) it's an incredible language targetting the Z Machine with a really easy OOP architecture to design your games. LLM's often lose the internal storyline on bizarre ways. An Inform 6 compiler can run under DOS/386 or Linux/BSD for 486 and compile a really large and functional game in seconds. For Inf…

That’s not my proposal. The LLM doesn’t run the world. It is simply the interface. It tells you the state of the game and tries to enhance the description. The game is a separate application and the LLM is simply an agentic layer between you and the actual game.

Inform 6/7 users don't need that. The engine does it all, modulo the object descriptions.

Re: The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took 40 years to finish

#44

Post by lIl-IIIl »

anthk wrote: post #43
ninetyninenine wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not my proposal. The LLM doesn’t run the world. It is simply the interface. It tells you the state of the game and tries to enhance the description. The game is a separate application and the LLM is simply an agentic layer between you and the actual game.

Inform 6/7 users don't need that. The engine does it all, modulo the object descriptions.

The engine doesn't understand natural English. It only understands the hard-coded words. The game author forgets to include some common verb or an uncommon spelling, and oops, an otherwise great puzzle is now very frustrating.

There's a reason "Guess the verb" meme exists. There's even a satire game on this concept: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=35arqepm2q92hcqu

Re: The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took 40 years to finish

#45

Post by anthk »

lIl-IIIl wrote: post #44
anthk wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inform 6/7 users don't need that. The engine does it all, modulo the object descriptions.

The engine doesn't understand natural English. It only understands the hard-coded words. The game author forgets to include some common verb or an uncommon spelling, and oops, an otherwise great puzzle is now very frustrating. There's a reason "Guess the verb" meme exists. There's even a satire game on this concept: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=35arqepm2q92hcqu

The engine is the ZMachine, and depending on the target and the grammar (IF6+English, or better, i7) the 'guess the verb' issue straightly died in the 90's.

Your comment coudn't be more outdated since the Curses! release for the ZMachine in 1993.

The v5 machine release was much better than the v3 one, and the v5-V8 ones allowed semi-complex phrases with indirect object pronouns after a previous entered phrase and much more.

Go play Anchorhead and compare it to a z3 machine game from Infocom, or any game made it with Puny Inform.

Re: The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took 40 years to finish

#46

Post by ninetyninenine »

Nevermark wrote: post #39
ninetyninenine wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The LLM could use a different session to respond to each command. That would keep its behavior passive and restricted to simply the current state, since it would retain no memory of previous actions.

Yeah many hacks require multiple prompts. So we have a prompt limit and that makes for a really good textual interface for these old style text based games.
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