BASIC programs producing playable web pages good enough?

Authoring Other Development Systems
21

If you want a rough idea of what SpiderBasic can do regarding text adventures, there is an example of my own tinkerings with it here.
Since it is for the web, you have to get your head around it being event-driven but, after that, it should all make sense.

2 Likes
22

Your game looks very impressive - just what I need with respect to functionality. I will have to look deeper to understand about “event-driven” to see if that makes it much harder to port older games. Thanks!

1 Like
23

Thanks Kenneth. :blush:
Essentially the effects of it being ‘event-driven’ are:

  1. The program sits in a loop waiting for an input to be made, rather than the ‘traditional’ BASIC ‘Input’ command which halts program execution. This is then processed as required.
  2. The ‘press any key’ thing has to be worked around similarly to input.
  3. You may have noticed that the ‘save/load’ dialogue sits there waiting for activity, rather than following the program flow.
    Other than that, there is very little that would come as a big surprise.
1 Like
24

Are all your TAOS games powered by SpiderBasic, then? Have you been manually adapting the GAC games or do you have a framework in place that roughly aligns with the way that system works.

25

They were all created using SpiderBasic.
The first game I remade, ‘The Open Door’ was not a GAC game, but I used it to get the basics of the engine running. This was all done manually.
Following that, I use the nuts & bolts of my GAC interpreter for the RasPi to extract the text into blocks of Data statements for Nouns / Verbs &c. . Then the real work starts, as all the conditions are hand-coded, meaning that I can easily refine, expand and develop them, in the hope of making the games a little more user-friendly.
So you’re pretty much on the nose.

1 Like
26

Well it certainly seemed to work well enough when I gave the TAOS games a go in the past.

[As an extra overlap between this and the other thread, the original Open Door was basically created using a version of Tom Frost’s Adventure Builder System, which is one of the BASIC-powered adventure systems I attempted to use back in the day. :slight_smile: It wasn’t very easy to use but the games worked well enough once the BASIC generated the game code. ]

1 Like
27

Hmm, sounds like Visual Studio now, which at 37 lines is not much better, but then puts every curly brace on its own line, so just as hard to get an overview.

[Sorry, off-topic venting]

28

Run Basic will run in the browser (understanding it is a paid product). Small Basic (free) will create an .exe file so other users do not need to have the software.If you are looking to create web pages in Basic, Run Basic is one of several choices.

1 Like
29

As @StJohnLimbo pointed out, Run Basic requires a server and therefore constant internet connection. SpiderBasic seems better and it has a free limited version. About Small Basic, exe-files are only for Windows which is quite a limitation as many(most?) of the IF community uses Mac. I don’t mind paying a one-time fee as long as it will be free for players.

1 Like
30

Had a quick look at Run BASIC. It still has GOTO but as an added bonus, line numbers do not have to go in order.

1 Like
31

I would doubt that Run Basic requires line numbers. It’s sister products, Liberty Basic and JustBasic do not. You still can use them, but why bother?

1 Like
32

I know, but the docs do have an example program:

30 print "hello"
20 input "What's your name"; n$
10 print "Nice to meet you "; n$

Nightmare fuel for coders.

3 Likes
33

On a more serious note, the copyright on the docs is 2007 and it is talking about Windows Vista. Is this a long dead project?

Also, before going to far into this I would advise verifying if you can get it to work on-line. Create a very small game, or even just a program that displays a welcome page, and try to upload it to a web site. I have very limited experience of doing that (with Ruby on rails and Node.js), and that is enough to know it is one thing having a project working on your computer and another to have it available on the web, and it is not clear to me how that would be done here.

Apologises if I just sound like I am knocking it in every post. If you can get it to work, it looks like a good way forward. But I would very much encourage you to verify you can get it to work before going to far. BASIC is just another language - I have no doubt a parser game can be made in it, and this version is set up to write HTML, which is a bonus. It is that last step that is dubious - and you do not want to leave it to the end to discover that.

Edited to correct the year: 207 - > 2007

2 Likes
34

I’m not exploring that product at this time but I recall it having a free trial. So two best ways to get answers to your questions is 1) do the free trial and see or 2) those products usually have a user forum where those questions can be asked.

1 Like
35

Have you looked at QBJS? GitHub - boxgaming/qbjs: QBasic for the web

2 Likes
36

Thanks, looks interesting. Due to lack of time I have currently stopped looking further at it though I might get back to it some day. But I know at least one author at least recently did well in a comp with a QBasic game so if QBJS is very compatible, his games could be playable online which would be great!

2 Likes
37

I have even seen a C=64 hooked on the ‘Net as a web server, so CBM basic IS capable of producing HTML output on the serial port… and I think that the same applies to nearby every 8/16 bit BASIC language. this imply that the good ol’ BWbasic (a free quasi-clone of GWbasic) can be used successfully in producing web pages on Linux, or, more interesting, virtualised in dosbox. (albeit the latter, as safety, is definitively a “sacrifical anode”, dos’s security being that is…)

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

3 Likes