During IFComp (which features a huge amount of games, amplifying the effect) there used to be threads in these forums anticipating eventual overlapping concepts. You would be amazed of how many pop up.
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First before I get boring and cold and mathematical I want to say I agree with everyone it’s neat to see the coincidences.
That said, my cold calculating side always looks to the Birthday Paradox, which many of us may know. It says that if there are 22 people in the same room, there’s a 50% chance of birthdays in common.
For any arbitrary number N, you need roughly sqrt(4N/3) people to get this result. The reason I bring this up is, there are a whole bunch of potential ideas and images out there, and if we pour enough into our games, and the comp is big enough, things are bound to overlap. It’s extra neat when it happens two games in a row between two authors one doesn’t think of as generally linking together. And the more ideas that fly around in every game, the more likely a few are to collide. That it happens with a good deal of regularity suggests that people are using their imagination.
But the thing about Birthday Paradox coincidences? You generally don’t expect, say, the 19th person to be the one matching someone else. It’s always a surprise when that specific number comes up. In the case of the 19th person there is a roughly 5% chance it’ll happen just then. So it seems like a big coincidence, but is it really? A coincidence was bound to happen eventually.
No matter how big the coincidence is, though, that shouldn’t stop us from enjoying it. Perhaps the coincidences and links are out there more than we think if we just pay attention. And we can expect to be surprised without contradiction.
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During IFComp (which features a huge amount of games, amplifying the effect) there used to be threads in these forums anticipating eventual overlapping concepts. You would be amazed of how many pop up.
Ha! Just my kind of thread. Love it.
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Interesting to call the command CLUE rather than HINT. I wonder if more games should do that. I think people have more positive associations with obtaining clues than they do with “giving up” and asking for a hint.
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I prefer CLUE, too. My parser recognises HINT as a synonym for folks brought up on games that prefer that, but all my documentation refers to CLUE. Like you, I think it resonates with more acceptable connotations.
Can’t mess with tradition too much, tho - I was thinking of a Left/Right/Ahead/Back movement system where exits were displayed based on the direction from which you entered the location (so entering the same location from different directions would result in different exits). I’m not sure if the world is quite ready for that (although it would be relatively easy to do with my game engine). Maybe an idea to which I’ll return once I design an adventure on a spaceship.
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Ha, the Discworld MUD does that for the Unseen University’s library, and it’s extremely confusing, even before you get deep enough into the library that it starts rolling against your direction skill to see if you end up facing the way you think you’re facing.
Of course, the library is intentionally confusing, all the rooms just have shelves and maybe chairs and tables, so you have to distinguish the rooms by their exits. But I feel like I’ve seen it in a game with more distinct locations and it was still significantly harder to navigate than compass directions. But if that’s what you’re going for…
Edit: gah, didn’t look at the thread title before posting; I…guess I’ll leave this here, but let’s not derail this too much farther…
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I found several threads on this topic, all linked to from https://intfiction.org/t/adaptive-directions-left-right-forward-back/8502. Some good advice in them.
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Well, I don’t mind my review topic spawning new discussions, just so folks know! All publicity is good publicity, etc.
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TALP/TALJ reviews will be going up, one per day, to IFDB as I work through them and edit them. They’ll be in alphabetical order. I put Mr Seguin’s Goat up because I had the most thoughts on it, especially with the hint topic, and I wanted to give a trial run to speaking a review into a phone, mixing it with what was on here, and editing for a final product.
- Barry Basic and the Witch’s Cave 6/19 12:01 AM GMT
- An Eggcellent Preparation 6/20 12:01 AM GMT
- First Encounter 6/21 12:01 AM GMT
- Interactive Adventurer’s Tutorial Adventure 6/22 12:01 AM GMT
- Midsummer’s Eve 6/23 12:01 AM GMT
- Mystery of Winchester High 6/24 12:01 AM GMT
- Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich: The Text Adventure 6/25 12:01 AM GMT
- Priceless Vase Adventure 6/26 12:01 AM GMT
Again, I’d like to encourage people to vote for what games they can, especially because TALP/TALJ encourages a lot of in-game tutorials and hints, thus making it less probable you’ll get stuck.
We’re at 75 now. 3 more people voting for every entry in the next 2 weeks would get us to 102, which would 1) be the number of votes from the first jam and 2) be the highest average votes per entry for all the jams.
It’s good to see votes spread out relatively evenly, too! And it’d be neat if we could get 10 votes for all the games. 3 votes on every game would get us there, too.
For the ones currently with minimum votes (7,) Priceless Vase Adventure is not a big game, IATA is very user-friendly and not out to pull one over on the player, and Mr. Seguin’s Goat has a pretty extensive hints topic as noted above.
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I voted for all but this one, as it says it’s Windows-only.
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I think that’s true. You might be able to get it working on an ADL interpreter on another platform, but they’re as rare as hen’s teeth. I think there’s one for the Amiga, but I couldn’t swear to that.
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I’m wondering how tricky the Windows would be to run on WINE, on Linux or Mac.
It looks like a Linux binary is here and I always forget what Linux binaries can run on Mac. It’s also 20 years outdated!
The code is here, with a makefile too, for anyone with dexterity with these kinds of things.
https://sourceforge.net/p/adl/code/ci/master/tree/
I don’t know how far we can/should stretch to get this working, or how useful it would be in the future, but I thought I’d put this out there. ADL doesn’t seem overly complex, so I doubt there are many system dependencies for building. But it isn’t something I’m confident I can do right off the bat, even though I have a Linux VM.
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I should have known this, I remember playing around with ADL back in the 90s on a Solaris machine. It was developed on UNIX IIRC so it should be fine.
[ Moments later. ]
ADLrun compiled easily on macOS (I had to mkdir Objs and then run make), but it won’t open the game file:
adl-code (master ✗)]$ ./adlrun/adlrun vase.out
ADL interpreter - Version 4.0 - December 7, 1994
Copyright 1985-1994 by Ross Cunniff
All rights reserved.
vase.out: Not an ADL datafile.
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Ugh. Maybe it is a problem with having a Mac carriage return instead of Windows carriage returns? Or a question of byte order?
It doesn’t seem like something you should have to debug!
Note: I’m trying to corrupt a copy of the data file on Windows, and it’s still running okay. I mangled some headers and random body text.
Perhaps adlrun has a debugging switch which could tell us what the offending byte is?
My suspicion is, people create ADL files as a hobby, and those files don’t gain wide exposure. If the author build on Windows and ran their games on Windows, and the developer built on Linux and ran on Linux, and cross-platform stuff would be covered.
The solution to this would be to ask the author for their source code and see what compiled. Or, better yet, have very simple ADL code that we compile on both Windows and Linux. Then we create .out files and see what’s different.
There’s a strong possibility the bug or bugs will get seen easily, but that is no guarantee. Still I hope this is a decent roadmap, and it’s good to know of the pitfalls that are there.
Perhaps if nothing else we could have a unix to windows conversion utility or vice versa.
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I tried one of the samples (tiny.adx) and it works properly.
Both files start with the same magic number (0xad10ad1) but vase.out has it in the wrong spot according to where the sourceforge ADLrun expects it. In tiny.adx it’s at about byte 0254 and it’s at byte 0330 in vase.out.
So either the version the author used is different than the sourceforge version or the Windows compiler isn’t respecting the int16/int32 types properly and making the header the wrong size or it’s an Intel vs ARM problem.
I’ll see if I can find a Raspberry pi around the place and compile it under Linux, but I doubt it’d be any different.
Can you try this file and see if it works on Windows (I’d be very surprised): iCloud
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Yes, I got a “corrupt file” notification. Perhaps there is a way to convert bytes from one format to the other? That seems like more work than is necessary.
But ugh … potentially having different versions create different file formats is more than a bit of a mess. Back when we had binary formats instead of a standard markup language, though, there wasn’t much choice.
It’s a lot of work to do just to get one game running. I suppose I could download the ADL building toolkit if I wanted, to see what tiny.adx would look like on Windows. If the byte-shifting wasn’t too bad, who knows?
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Fixing the header might be straightforward, but it’s probably a symptom of a wider malaise. If you have time, try building tiny.adx yourself and see how much bigger it is. If it’s only ~40 bytes it’s just the header, but any more than that and it’s a bigger problem.
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Hello, Aschultz! I just wanted to inform that Adventure Definition Language (ADL) offers Transcription feature. It is built-in! Just tyle SCRIPT command while playing the game. You will then be aksed to enter the file-name. To close transcription, just type Script command again. The script-file will contain both input and output of the game. So - no need to use Tee utilities.
Note: The transcription feature is available with ($spec 8 filename) command, but it is provided within Standard include file as a "Script" command.
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Thanks! (And welcome to the board!) I’ll remember this for future games. It’s good to see ADL’s features I wasn’t immediately aware of.
Re transcripting, it seems fair game to put something in any ABOUT commands, or in the introduction, or in a readme? I think a lot of people would be willing to help you out with this if you want feedback.
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Hello Stephen,
I compiled ADL compiler and interpreter for Unix based systems and will provide working compilations of my future text-adventure games. Thank you for testing and information.
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