Original Adventure Game ported to Inform 7

Playing Project Announcements
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Hi everyone! Although I am new to the community, I’ve been following the advancement of IF from when I was young and have played around with coding in TADS and Inform for many years. I’m posting here the project I have been working on for some time: A faithful port of the original 350-adventure in Inform 7. I tried to keep as much original as possible with upgrading the player experience to a modern parser. Everything is from the original source code with the additions from TADS Colossal Cave Revisited and a couple of things from the Inform 6 version. I want feedback from the community on the quality of the coding and any improvements that could be made. I guess I also need people to test for any bugs. I’m hoping that this can become an example game for others to see many features of inform 7. Here’s the website the code is on:
https://github.com/2lindell/advent

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I now have a release of above code playable online:
https://2lindell.github.io/advent/

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I played Colossal Adventure (the Level 9 version of Adventure) as a child but never got very far. One of these days I mean to try to actually get somewhere substantial with it (probably with heavy use of hints, let’s be fair) and of course I can’t help but wonder which of the many available versions best balances authenticity with modern convenience. Do you have any sense of whether your version is more or less faithful than, for example, the Inform 6 version (which seems to be the go-to for many people, but I also gather that it has some bugs which alter or obviate some of the puzzles)?

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At a quick glance, this version is close to the original, as Nathaniel describes.

There’s been a couple more I7 ports over the years:

the Inform 6 version (which seems to be the go-to for many people, but I also gather that it has some bugs which alter or obviate some of the puzzles)?

I take it you’re referring to my post here, which talks about slightly different endgame logic. And Witt’s End, that’s right.

I think it’s worth somebody fixing those (but I’ve never bothered). However, I hesitate to call any version of adventure “bug-free”. The whole thing is too developmental and ad-hoc to have a real “spec”.

For what it’s worth, the biggest gap in the I6 version is that it only models one dwarf at a time, which appears at random. The original has five dwarves that move according to map connections.

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In my browser (Chrome on Windows) Quixe is constantly flipping between having scrollbars outside of the game proper, or only in the main window. I don’t know if that’s a regular problem with Quixe. @zarf Have you seen it happen before?

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I would consider my port much more faithful than the Inform 6 version. I started my project working off the Inform 6 version, and when I realized how many differences it exhibited from the original I went back to the original code. Most of the “bugs” are mentioned already on other threads (carrying things in the wicker cage, teleporting past puzzles, endgame timer issues) but there are also differences in what commands can be used (including the inability for the parser to guess obvious things like using the keys to unlock the grate). I did keep one convention from the I6 version - magic words only work when the room is visited. I felt that it was a reasonable change (but the parser still acknowledges them by saying “Nothing happens”).

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I’m having the same problem. I don’t know if it’s something in the html code or something else.

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Yeah, I see that in Chrome, and I haven’t seen it before either. Seems to be Firefox too.

It also happens on Adventure — Play , which is also Quixe 2.2.4. I guess I blew something in the latest release. Blah. I’ll see what I can figure out.

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Without even testing, I am sure it is this change: Improve the gameport offset logic. · erkyrath/glkote@e86609f · GitHub

Curse you, outerHeight, for your shocking but inevitable betrayal!

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If you want a solution before Zarf can fix Quixe, then switching to Parchment should work. You can get the latest Parchment for Inform 7 from Releases · curiousdannii/parchment · GitHub

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Thanks!

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There is a problem in the .css of the standard template.
My testers for Breakfast in the Dolomites had the same problem with Chrome and Edge, but not with Firefox (which I use).

I solved it by modifying it this way:

#gameport
{
	background: white;
	bottom: 0px;
	left: 15.4em;
	line-height: 1.4;
	margin: 0px;
	position: absolute;
	right: 0px;
	top: 0px;
	overflow-x: hidden;
}

The difference is the last line.

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Thanks. I’m not sure why the windowframes are overflowing the gameport. It may be a rounding error, which I should fix. But I’ll try the CSS change too.

(Never hurts to solve a problem twice!)

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Yeah, the measurement of the gameport was being rounded to the nearest integer, meaning sometimes it was rounded up.

Turns out I had overflow: hidden in all the Quixe test cases! But that line got dropped from the I7 template version. Then Safari avoided the problem anyhow, by not showing scrollbars for an overflow of less than one pixel.

I will add safeguards.

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I have released Quixe 2.2.5, which fixes this bug.

Quixe: a Glulx VM interpreter written in Javascript

https://eblong.com/zarf/glulx/quixe/Quixe-225.zip

Also fixes a nuisance where the pageup/pagedown keys weren’t always working in Firefox.