I saw reviews on IFDB saying that the Inform 6 port of 350 point Adventure is buggy. I want to update the PunyInform port to fix such issues and, if I get Graham’s blessing, update the Inform 6 version as well. The major issues I know of are:
The player can bypass puzzles where they shouldn’t be able to carry a certain item while performing a certain action, by putting the item in the wicker cage and carrying the cage.
The player gets an incorrect point deduction if they take a treasure from the wicker cage while inside the building, since the game thinks they have already deposited the treasure in the building and received deposit points for it.
Do you know of other issues?
Would you be interested in playtesting the updated game?
The “latest” version is dated 060321, and the last couple of changes were by Roger Firth, not Graham. (I think. “RF” in the log anyhow.)
There’s the issue I mention here. Going west from Witt’s End is supposed to be blocked “by a recent cave-in”, but the before:Go clause is written so that going west always sends you to the Anteroom.
(Other directions than west have a 5% chance of letting you out. That part works correctly, but west is supposed to be 100% blocked.)
The crystal bridge is supposed to disappear when you get the “cave closed” message. The I6 version fails to set the absent flag, so it reappears immediately.
The timing logic on the “cave is closing” announcement is also suspect. The original Fortran Advent and the TADS port behave differently, and the I6 port does something different from both of them.
Roughly, in the original, the cave closes some time after discovering the last treasure. So you have to rush to the well-house. In TADS, it closes some time after you deposit the last treasure; it’s set up so that after the announcement fires, you are stuck underground. (Grate locked, magic words deactivated.) In I6, the announcement pops after you pick up the last treasure, and you have to rush to the well-house – which is possible, because the magic words still work, even though the cave is notionally closed.
(As I note in my post, I think the TADS version plays best, dramatically speaking.)
If you really want to get into the guts, update the dwarf logic to match the original. Five dwarves, moving independently, and it’s possible for multiple dwarves to be in the same room with you. (All attacking you, of course.)
I assume Graham avoided that because the original Advent.inf was v3-compatible and meant to run on original Infocom interpreters. We have way more headroom now.