This thread is for audience commentary on the second episode of Season One for Iron ChIF. If you’d like to cheer, crack jokes, make observations or ask questions, please do – that’s what this thread is for! Your questions and comments will be brought to the attention of the episode’s cast.
Keep an eye out for these key dates:
Sun May 24 – development period begins
Fri May 29 – development period ends, finished games released for play
Sun May 31 – judges’ scoring announced, audience voting begins
Tue Jun 02 – audience voting ends, winner declared
Remember: For Iron ChIF your votes will determine which competing chef prevails. The judges’ scoring reflects their combined expert opinion, but it will be used to determine the winner only in the event that the audience vote yields a tie.
Those of you who are official Tasters are encouraged to put on your Taster flair to show support for the chefs who are putting themselves through the wringer for your entertainment and edification. If you’re not yet an official Taster, you can sign up at any time via the group page.
I’m super excited about this episode because I know what it’s like and it’s awesome. I’m sure both competitors will experience things differently than I did, but that intense five-day crucible of creativity is seriously unlike anything I’d ever experienced in my entire life. Go chefs! Enjoy the ride!
I’m also really looking forward to this episode! Onno’s a super creative author who always comes up with neat experiences no matter what authoring system he’s working in, and Max just about wrote the book on ZIL!
I think we’re in for a treat with this matchup, can’t wait to see the ingredient!
FYI to everyone, I’m expecting to announce the replacement judge within the next few hours.
In the meantime, in case anyone missed it, Lancelot has put out a call for beta testers. If you think that’s something that might be fun, let him know – it’s even better than a front row seat!
An usher makes his way down the aisle, and taps Lucian on the shoulder. With a start, Lucian turns around, and the usher whispers in his ear. “Oh, really? Wow! OK, right. Now? Now. Sure! Absolutely!” He jumps up, spilling some of his popcorn, glances back and forth between his hands and shoves his drink at the usher. “Lead on!” he tells her, as she takes it, and the two of them make their way to a side exit, while Lucian eats another handful of popcorn.
Hm. ZIL occupies a space in my brain like say the Pyramids in Egypt: a wondrous artifact from the past that captures the imagination, but has almost no relevance to my daily life. What does our Technical Expert have to say about it?
Oh, ZIL, we’re going to get along JUST FINE.
“Time and Space bending artifact” is a wild feature ingredient for this format! “ChIFs, you have one week to implement ALL OF HISTORY AND FUTURE. GO!!!” Dis gonna be fun.
Yeah, but of course that would be too ambitious for a project of this scope. I’m sure the judges would be satisfied even if the contestants just implemented something modest, like one location per continent, depicted once per century in the modern era.
There were a good handful of games with this sort of “time and space exploration” theme back in the early years of text adventures[1], because it’s an easy way to justify a Zorkian mishmash of genres and setting elements—Zork jumping from the solid gold coffin of Ramses II to a voice-controlled robot and a dragon isn’t very coherent, but add a time machine, swap the dragon to a dinosaur, and now those are all part of the same setting again.
But also, most of those early games weren’t very good. The most (in)famous of them is probably Sierra’s (then On-Line’s) Time Zone, a sprawling behemoth of a game that needed six double-sided floppies to store, set a world record for price, and had basically no testing. Infocom’s Trinity from 1986 is the first one I know of that’s remembered fondly nowadays. (And will be very familiar to our Iron ChIF!) Graham Nelson’s Jigsaw (1995) was an homage to that, and has also stood the test of time.
Which suggests that one way to make a “bend time and space” game appeal to a modern audience is to have a strong thematic throughline, like “the development of nuclear weapons” or “how Europe changed over the course of the 20th century”—something more cohesive than a Zorkian genre mashup. But is something like that reasonable in the span of five days?
If I were competing here, I would be tempted to focus this down as small as possible. Make the artifact connect two, maybe three times/places and try to make them interact in interesting ways. Maybe a great disaster is looming and you need help from both the good times of the past and the barren wasteland of the future to avert it. But the end result would probably still be more Zork than Trinity.
I’m eager to see where the competitors decide to go with this!
I don’t remember a lot of them in particular—they kind of blur together—but a search for “time” on All the Adventures currently gets ten hits. ↩︎
It’s great when a development system allows this! Ink, Dialog, and Inform 7 are the three IF systems I know that support it—that is, they let you edit your source, hit a button, and have the game update, without losing your progress. I don’t think there’s a way to do that with ZIL yet.
(For Inform, you have to specifically hit “replay” rather than “run”. For Dialog, you need to use the interactive debugger dgdebug rather than dialogc. For Ink, you have to use the Inky editor.)
I’m also so glad this is being highlighted. Even though ZIL is older than pretty much any other IF tool, its macro system is truly unmatched. No other compiler on the market (as far as I know) lets you mess with the fundamental structure of the language like this, building things like “here’s how you declare an object” or “here’s how you declare a property” in the language itself.
I7 lets you define new relations, TADS lets you mess with the code at runtime, Dialog lets you build your own parser…but to the best of my knowledge, not a single one of them would let you construct something as fundamental as an “if” statement or a “for” loop within the language itself. Even outside the IF world, that sort of power is mostly restricted to LISP and its descendants.
The result is that ZIL projects can offload a whole lot of work to the compiler—which historically ran on a much more powerful computer than the compiled games did—without tweaking the compiler itself.
(I suspect this is how the route-finding works in Suspended—using macros to build the routes at compile-time instead of runtime—but I don’t understand the ZIL source well enough to be sure. But some trickery must have been involved to let GO TO ALPHA FC happen in seconds back in 1983.)
From what I can tell, Suspended uses predefined routes set up like intersecting train lines: each room is on a line, and there’s a table listing where to go to transfer between each pair of lines.
The V6 games do a bunch of work at compile time to create parsing tables.
If I understood @vaporware correctly, normal parentheses in ZIL are very similar to the quote form in Scheme. From what I’ve seen, though, they seem a lot more common in ZIL than quote invocations are in Scheme. Hopefully, more code examples will clarify why this is the case.
tangent regarding Scheme
I suppose modern Scheme makes less use of the “code as data” paradigm than previous Lisps anyway, with the traditional form of eval being fundamentally incompatible with lexical scoping, and with “defmacro Schemes” being phased out in favor of R5RS’s annoyingly limited macro system (and, later on, R6RS’s aggravatingly complicated one).
Thinking about this has led me to another technical question for the technical advisor: is ZIL a single-namespace or dual-namespace Lisp?
(Also, integers are called “fixes” because they’re handled with fixed-precision integer arithmetic, right?)
Came here to say this. I can’t believe Max is competing in Iron ChIF while also doing his GCSEs! Hopefully he has a real-life time-bending artefact to help him fit everything in.
I don’t want to imply that SomeOne2’s commitment is anything less than tremendous, but lest anyone think that we’re prioritizing entertainment over education, I do want to point out that our esteemed Iron Chef is the one who suggested this particular schedule, because it would present no conflict with academic activities.
No grade point averages were harmed in the production of this event.
I’m also curious about the naming of SPACE-TIME? and DESTINATION?. In my limited LISP experience, I’m used to a final ? meaning “this returns true or false”. But here, these routines print text. Is the question mark used differently in ZIL? Or is this a personal style thing?
