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1977: Zork

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Re: 1977: Zork

#81

Post by ci5er »

the_af wrote: post #2

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. and It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue. are such iconic phrases, they bring a ton of good memories to my mind. And I never even finished Zork or Adventure!

How about Hitchhiker's? There were a couple of frustrating bits there. Gosh - I must have played a dozen of those things - and now, being old, I probably couldn't remember what I did, and am probably too stupid to figure it out again. (Or I have other things to do than beat my head against the wall ... or all the above)

Re: 1977: Zork

#82

Post by ci5er »

ci5er wrote: post #81
the_af wrote: post #2

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. and It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue. are such iconic phrases, they bring a ton of good memories to my mind. And I never even finished Zork or Adventure!

How about Hitchhiker's? There were a couple of frustrating bits there. Gosh - I must have played a dozen of those things - and now, being old, I probably couldn't remember what I did, and am probably too stupid to figure it out again. (Or I have other things to do than beat my head against the wall ... or all the above)

Edit- planet fall was also fun - these were a nice mix-up with Sirtech"s Wizardry... "A Kobold"

Re: 1977: Zork

#83

Post by ChicagoDave »

Mainframe Zork aka Dungeon aka DUNGEO on the pdp-11 pretty much changed my life. I was a jock in high school until I found the math lab with two paper terminals and two geeks playing Adventure and Dungeon. It was literally like lightning hitting me. I spent nearly every waking hour on computers the rest of my time in high school and employed as a programmer by nineteen. It's been 36 years and I still write code, design/architect business systems, and enjoy the work.

Re: 1977: Zork

#84

Post by pimlottc »

pmiller2 wrote: post #41
VadimPR wrote: post #29

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)

I have not played MUDs in a long time, but, when I did, I always just got by with Tintin++. I never went all the way and wrote an actual bot that could run unattended, because there were so many different things that could really mess up your bot, or, at least cause it to act impolite, that it looked like more trouble than it was worth. Also, I wasn't that great at scripting with tt++. :P I was, however, (literally)…

Yeah, I also got heavily invested in tt++ scripts but never fully automated. It was great back in the day but there were definitely some eccentricities that made advanced difficult - lack of proper lists, awkwardness dealing with empty strings, weird scoping and special variables, no dicts.

I recently dusted off my old files and tried to get it running in the latest version but there were so many breaking changes that I just gave up trying to fix it.

It would be fun to try to make a proper fully automated bot, though as you said, there are so many different contexts and possible text prompts itd be difficult to make it truly reliable. I wonder what the best approach would be - some kind of classic AI goal system or newfangled ML?

(If I had the time to start over, I’d probably use Mudlet since it uses a proper scripting (lua) instead of something that got hacked together over time. Though it’s a bit GUI-reliant for my tastes)

Re: 1977: Zork

#85

Post by danielrpa »

the_af wrote: post #2

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. and It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue. are such iconic phrases, they bring a ton of good memories to my mind. And I never even finished Zork or Adventure!

I've recently played the entire Infocom text adventure catalog using walkthroughs. Yes, it feels somewhat like reading a book (although it's more "active" - hard to explain), but you get to experience a lot of what made the stories great. If you just want to finish Zork, I recommend this approach.

Re: 1977: Zork

#87

Post by pmiller2 »

pimlottc wrote: post #84
pmiller2 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not played MUDs in a long time, but, when I did, I always just got by with Tintin++. I never went all the way and wrote an actual bot that could run unattended, because there were so many different things that could really mess up your bot, or, at least cause it to act impolite, that it looked like more trouble than it was worth. Also, I wasn't that great at scripting with tt++. :P I was, however, (literally)…

Yeah, I also got heavily invested in tt++ scripts but never fully automated. It was great back in the day but there were definitely some eccentricities that made advanced difficult - lack of proper lists, awkwardness dealing with empty strings, weird scoping and special variables, no dicts. I recently dusted off my old files and tried to get it running in the latest version but there were so many breaking changes tha…

Yeah, tt++'s programming model is essentially a finite state machine with a single global scope. If that sounds hard to work with, it is.

I think if I were starting over, I'd go with a client that's extensible in a real language, whether that be Lua, Python, Ruby, Scheme, elisp, etc., simply so I could take advantage of modern programming language features.

Re: 1977: Zork

#88

Post by markbnj »

keyle wrote: post #61
markbnj wrote: post #59

I have Zork from Infocom in the original packaging with 5.25 floppies... wonder if it's worth anything?

This isn't like an old camera that can still be used to shoot amazing pictures... Your floppies are mostly sentimental. The game is wildly available online and even on the web as web app. I'd recommend you frame them carefully and hang them in pride on your wall.

Yeah I doubt the disks can even be read anymore.

Re: 1977: Zork

#89

Post by raldi »

dang wrote: post #63

If curious, from the archives: Zork source and binaries, January 1978 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24371538 - Sept 2020 (13 comments) Zork source code, 1977 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23108626 - May 2020 (81 comments) Exploring Zork (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20731333 - Aug 2019 (22 comments) Zork and the Z-Machine: Bringing the Mainframe to 8-Bit Home Computers - https://news…

The Data Structures Behind Zork - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4564290 - Sept 2012 (0 comments)
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