I really like this idea, but I do not have time to do that on my Infocom collection page. Just to be clear about it! :)
(My collection has maxed out on what we have recovered from the 1980s, as far as I know. I am content to leave it as-is from now on.)
If we could have a central one with read/write permissions I’d be happy to commit to updating it with any mods that I release into the world.
Borrowing from Crow 64 ARG again, they have that community document which most people can edit. It’s just a text file. Perhaps we could have a community spreadsheet?
Thanks Viv. I appreciate everyone taking the time to bring their viewpoints, I thought I’d get a handful of replies at most! I think it’s a case of “doing” now, I suspect once I start editing and releasing the hacked versions people will see that it’s not quite as bad as they originally feared. Certainly if I can do anything to make the games more accessible then that would be something I’d love to do!
I don’t mind owning this, given that I kicked this all off.
As a starter for 10, can everyone add to the following?
Sounds good!
fully agree. I’m not sure of my handling of wiki markup, but I guess that in few days we can port on ifwiki the content of both fact sheet and bug list, e.g. using the easiest case, wishbringer:
on the relevant page of if wiki, that is,
Wishbringer - IFWiki , we can put something like that:
RELEASES (the header should be a link to a page explaining the format)
68.850501 3 128952
69.850920 3 128904
BUGS (again a link explaining the format…)
VERSION 1
68/850501 Y
69/850920 N
(SG) 23/880706 N
[then the bug description under a spoiler hiding]
(The above is done with a crude copy’n paste, but with wiki markups the tables should be in a proper tabular format…)
I guess it’s a simple work of doing a template in wiki markups and pasting the relevant content from the fact and bug sheet. Easy for people versed in wiki markup or I’m wrong ?
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
It would be good to add some content to some relevant pages first, which would help decide how any template should be designed.
I will like to read a rationale behind the hack. Maybe that’s for the if wiki as you said. Why the thing to be changed needed to be changed.
An analogy could be drawn to a “clean” remix, given that the “explicit” original is not being displaced or erased.
Wait, what… there’s a Deadline sequel? Where can I find out more?
I was referring to an uncompleted project announced by Adam Sommerfield last year, a “spiritual successor to Deadline, Witness etc but that was grittier and covered multiple overlapping plots and murders to be solved.” It’s been referred to elsewhere as Deadline II.
Thank you. Looks like it was a cool idea that ran out of steam during Covid. I hope someone will make a go of it. Not sure why folks were thinking of doing this in ZIL when it is so much easier to use a high-level language like Inform or similar.
Apparently there are plenty of people in the IF-community who have a “Why take the easier road when I can take the hard and rocky pitfall-filled detour just for the fun of it”-mentality.
More power to them. (They may need it.)
I don’t understand why some feel a need to question other peoples choices.
Just because you find Inform easier doesn’t mean that that is universal for everyone.
Still, ZIL is so much harder to use. I am trying to use it though, so I won’t question either.
I think a lot of IF selects for stubbornness and independent thought in gamers (as well as selecting for the sort of people who want to make games in the first place), so it stands to reason that there are plenty of people who like doing things the difficult way. I know that these days the first game to traditionally be played on an unconventional device (e.g. toaster, piano) is Doom, but I feel like IF would either be the second game played on that device - or the unheralded genre of game used to check the device works well enough to try programming Doom onto it.
I’m fine with any amount of modifying of older games, so long as it is easy to tell you are playing a modded one and not an original.
When hacks start being indistinguishable form the original without careful analysis, then I’d prefer they not exist.
I’m not sure if this is the newest thread on Infocom games hacks?
Personally, I hope to play the original games with improvements such as X for examine etc. For instance, I never completed Zork Zero and Beyond Zork so there definitely is an audience, though perhaps quite small.
I recently bought “Zork Anthology” on Steam and it is just so handy how easy it is to run one of those games. I found out that it is just as easy to replace a z-code file (though the extensions are different) so that would be neat. That would of course require that the z-machine version is unchanged.
I might be dreaming but on a long term note, I would like to translate e.g. Zork or Planetfall to Danish if that is possible? (German and Japanese versions exists) Believe it or not, the structure isn’t that different from English and I have co-translated the Standard ADRIFT library to Danish so I have a little experience. The main problem may be that we have three more letters: æ, ø and å. If possible I might look into ZIL one day.
Speaking of which, are there any translations of the games into Spanish? (There is a Zork one, but it crashes the game.)