51–60 of 94 posts
As someone that first played Adventure on a teletype in 1976, I always seem to take affront to article titles implying Zork was there first. In this case "50 years of text games" is the substack name, and this is just the entry for Zork in 1977. See https://if50.substack.com/p/1976-adventure for the real deal.
Anyone play Aidungeon.io? They hooked GPT-3 up to make a Zork where you can do basically anything and the game will come back with something that's at least interesting. It's interesting how crazy new tech concepts come in as pure text first. For example, MUDs were the first MMORPGs back in the 90s.
It’s amusing but it’s not a game. It will respond with something (often amusing) to any promos you write but there aren’t any rules to what you get back and there are no puzzles to solve. Zork, on the other hand, is an actual game you can solve, complete with a scoring system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
MUDs were the first MMORPGs back in the 90s Early 80's via BBSes, online services, and BBS networks like ARBnet. BBS play was slow, but it was so novel and compelling, you didn't care.
Those BBS games back in the day were only 1 or 2 people though because they required one to tie up a phone line to play and most home setups couldn't support more than a few nodes, at least until the 90s.
Not entirely. Even with phone connections, networks like ARB could do multi-player. But they turn-based, and as I said, took a long time.
If you wanted more real-time, you went with something like CI$.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could do that with whatever interactive fiction tools you want, combined with some form of speech to text software. For instance, Inform 7 for your IF tool, and any of the following for speech to text: https://www.lifewire.com/state-of-linux-voice-recognition-22... That said, I'm not sure how good any of those speech to text tools actually are, so, this might be kind of a pipe dream at the moment. Also, I know yo…
Thanks. It really is the voice to text that is the concern. I noodled around with an interactive fiction game concept a while back focused on a nuclear showdown. I wanted to build it into an red analog telephone. The phone would ring and you would hear a message from various government/military types. As tensions rise, the phone rings more often, possibly multiple lines light up forcing you to catch/miss vital inform…
Does anyone know of tools to make very basic text games and publish them to the web... like Choose Your Own Adventure type stories?
https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~matuszek/cis554-2015/Assignments/...
If you'd like to dig further, online text games (MUDs) are still around. https://mudlet.org is a nice modern client for playing them! (bias: I'm the project lead)
Hi Vadi! Sarapis here. ;) He's right, Mudlet is the best desktop client out there for Mudding with. This is the part where I mention that I run a company with five MUDs ranging from almost 24 years live to just a couple years live. https://ironrealms.com
One of the coolest technical aspects of early Infocom text adventure games is that most games weren't actually written using native assembly code for the platforms they ran on, and were instead compiled down to "z-code", a bytecode which ran on the "z-machine" virtual machine architecture. Z-machines are pretty niftly little bits of tech, as while they have a lot in common with regular 'ol machine code, the z-machine…
With a virtual machine, virtual memory, and (for the time) a great natural language parser, it shows that the Infocom folks learned their craft in world of academia, high-end computer hardware, and ideas, instead of the more amateur (at the time) world of microcomputer enthusiasts.