Load saved game with gargoyle for zborb game?

Playing Getting Started Playing IF
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I have a very stupid question: I’ve started playing Low-key learny jokey journey from the comp yesterday. I entered save to save a game and this worked perfectly, but now I can’t load my saved game.
The command “load” is not recognized and I can’t think of any other. I haven’t been able to find the information online.

The funny thing is “load” works in Trouble in Sector 471 but it’s a different format, could it be that different formats have different commands for loading?

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Have you tried RESTORE? Honestly I thought LOAD worked too though…

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Yeah, restore works, thank you so much! :slight_smile: I was at my wits’ end!

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This is one of those automatic things where I assume everyone knows the command, just because that’s the way Infocom always did it.

But now that I think of it, I try for a simplified parser, and in this case LOAD is 3 fewer keystrokes than RESTORE.

Most other Inform programmers will probably figure the code, but there is one small thing to note in the one-line fix:

understand "load" as restoring the game. ["restoring" alone won't work]

This is worthwhile and simple enough it may go into my general utilities file.

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could it be that different formats have different commands for loading?

Nearly all game formats use SAVE and RESTORE by default, but that’s because they’re all imitating Infocom’s parser. Games can change the defaults if they want. Apparently Trouble in Sector 471 does.

[Inform 7 code tweak:]
understand "load" as restoring the game.

Some games will have LOAD as an in-game verb (for LOAD GUN, maybe). This would conflict with that.

Yes, SAVE could conflict with an in-game verb too, but it’s too late to do anything about that.

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I’ve done this so many times: LOAD … Nope. Ugh, what’s the weird word that they use? … Oh yeah, RESTORE.

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Thanks @zarf and @aschultz for the explanation of why it works in some games and not others!

I’m positive I have saved and restored games successfully in the past so I don’t know why I wasn’t able to come up with restore this time. @JoshGrams maybe having started this thread will help me remember it in the future! :wink:

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LOAD is a common (that is, main and not synonym) verb for many sensible action in an IF, or text adventure:

LOAD GUN, or much less violent,
LOAD MIXER WITH [component]
LOAD CART
LOAD TANK WITH [liquid]
LOAD “ZORK” ON APPLE ][

(on the last one, I actually mulled about adding an appropriate lobby to Polyadventure…)

&c. &c, hence RESTORE in place of LOAD for loading saved games.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Good points–I don’t know about overloading (heh) syntax in this case, but this seems technically doable:

load-warn is a truth state that varies.

understand the command "load" as something new.

understand "load" as quasirestoring.

understand "load [thing]" as thingloading.

quasirestoring is an action out of world.

carry out quasirestoring:
	if load-warn is false:
		now load-warn is true;
		say "ONE-TIME NOTE: this game/story uses LOAD as a physical verb with a subject. Without it, it replaces RESTORE.";
	try restoring the game;

thingloading is an action applying to one thing.

carry out thingloading:
	say "Loading [the noun].";

PUT X IN/ON Y seems like good-enough alternate syntax if we want to avoid that clash most of the time. But LOAD ZORK, of course, is ore difficult to find a substitute for!

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yea. It’s a pity that neither Colossal Cave Revisited and its successor, Polyadventure was never ported to TADS3, where the solution to the lobby problem (military exercise sense) was relatively easy, on paper, (ab)using the various classes available in the adv3 and a3lite libraries, namely intangible and numberProd, easily parsing the “ADVENTURE 350” (or 550, 551 etc…) part of the coding exercise…

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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