SHELLSCOTT, a shell for writing Scott-Adams style stories with Inform 6

Authoring Inform 6
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Admittely, I have a bit too of time available, so for fun, I have stripped down the source of the Inform 6 version of Adventureland into its shell and the entire fun was done in between half and three quarter of an hour.

the results from the compilation are promising for a potential developer:

inform -s shellscott.inf 
Inform 6.42 for Linux (10th February 2024)
line 33: Warning:  Class "Treasure" declared but not used
line 40: Warning:  Class "Sign" declared but not used
In:  7 source code files             10821 syntactic lines
 13000 textual lines                442485 characters (ISO 8859-1 Latin1)
Allocated:
  1655 symbols                      840554 bytes of memory
Out:   Version 5 "Advanced" story file 1.241120 (61.5K long):
     9 classes                          30 objects
   157 global vars (maximum 233)      2480 variable/array space
   101 verbs                           323 dictionary entries
   211 grammar lines (version 2)       344 grammar tokens (unlimited)
   115 actions                          31 attributes (maximum 48)
    48 common props (maximum 61)        51 individual props (unlimited)
 47944 bytes of Z-code                3108 unused bytes stripped out (6.5%)
 16069 characters used in text       13198 bytes compressed (rate 0.821)
     0 abbreviations (maximum 64)      398 routines (unlimited)
 10995 instructions of Z-code         6338 sequence points
 10040 bytes readable memory used (maximum 65536)
 62648 bytes used in Z-machine      199496 bytes free in Z-machine
Compiled with 2 warnings
Completed in 0.031 seconds

I guess that with >192 Kbytes thereā€™s enough elbow space, considering also the terseness of a Scott Adams-style storyā€¦
Now, without much ado, here is the shellscott.inf file, for who want to play/mess with it; hope that our fellow Inform 6 coders has fun as I haveā€¦

shellscott.inf (4.7 KB)

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

1 Like
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My comment should not detract from your fun, which youā€™ve already enjoyed, but the I6 ports of the Scott Adams games are the ones I trust the least for accuracy.

Compared to the commercial eight-bit versions, theyā€™ve had bugs and innaccuracies that Iā€™ve experienced, and others that are just rumoured. I know there is a note attached to one or more of them somewhere admitting to possible buginess (I donā€™t mean the readme in the zip of them at IFArchive, but I couldnā€™t re-find this other note right now.)

The trouble is, unless I or someone else sits down and does an A/B test of each game, the innaccuracies and rumours stand, meaning these are versions I donā€™t play or use. I also donā€™t know the source of the problems. At the Scottfree level? In the conversion to I6? I just donā€™t know.

That doesnā€™t mean the framework doesnā€™t broadly work, or that this could be a fun way to start an Adams-like adventure. But if it was a case where I wanted to be sure I was using his format as verbatim as possible, I would be using some other ā€˜saferā€™ base platform as my foundation, not this particular I6 one.

-Wade

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Coincidentally, I just came across this today for unrelated reasons!

https://www.ifiction.org/games/index.php?cat=44

2 Likes
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Thanks, Daniel; archived and stored in if/doc for eventual reference (is sad that the details on the bugs arenā€™t stored here; but I note that the zcode version was built by machine conversion in late 90s.

If one notes, in this reduction to shell I have preserved the pair of classes whose implement the core of the terse, minimalist prose at the core of the Adams style.

and, I noted a major advantage: the terseness of the Adams style allows the removal of the ā€œbad englishā€ argument, keeping the advantages of a powerful language and library, and the availability of very mature 'terps.

Enough advantages for ensuring at least the third-to-last place, I supposeā€¦ :wink: but is a very optional sideshow re. next backgarden and the main WIP.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.