Victor Gijsbers's IF Archive 2004-2019

Playing Project Announcements
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I’m putting a massive 372 MB zip-file online which contains more or less all of my Interactive Fiction related creations of the period 2004-2019. All my completed games, with source code and assorted extra files; all of my abandoned, incomplete games; reviews and essays; backups of my blog, my IFDB reviews and my forum posts. I will also upload this to the IF Archive, since the archive’s administrators have told me that they do accept such collections.

What is the purpose of this archive? Partly it is to safeguard a very small but I hope not entirely irrelevant part of IF history, so that future ‘digital antiquarians’ can look for whatever they might then be looking for – even if sites like the IFDB or Blogger go offline. Partly it is for those of you who are curious to delve into some of the dusty corners of my IF directories and see, say, the somewhat impressive number of ATTACK-based I games I started and then quickly abandoned before I hit on the idea of make the roguelike that would be Kerkerkruip.

Probably the most relevant part of the release are the source codes to my completed games. Some of these were already available, but many were not. So whether it is The Baron or Terminal Interface that you are interested in, the source is here! (I’ll also be uploading these separately and linking to them from the IFDB at some later point.) What’s more, I am relaxing my source code licensing. In the past, I licensed my source code under the GPL; from today, I’m giving you the choice between GPL and Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial, the latter of which might be more useful to some of you. (Since it does not require you to publish your own derivative source code under the same license.)

The archive’s main directory contains a file that serves as a table of contents, so please view that for further details. Have fun! (And perhaps consider doing the same thing, if you’re an author.)

15 Likes
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On doing the same thing… on paper the work on my side is easy, because all is stored (both on operational drives and backups) archive inside a centralised …/if/wrk directory, in reality, there’s many little embarassing things (normal fans writes fanfictions, IF author fans write interactive fanfictions, and there’s many things whose are not only of questionable IP status, but also admittely of “less than mary sue” quality…), so a serious pruning should be done prior of committing my archives…

… aside the occasional questionable humour used on placeholder things (admittely, the stock one, about “mists of unimplementnessness” is decent enough to be quoted), there’s jabs around whose needs doing pruning also inside the files, and this in the end defy the actual scope of the initiative, on which I generally concur and agree.

Kudos and Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Your point about embarrassing things in your own working directories reminds me of one the weirdest things I have on CD. It’s on the album Horn Concertos of the Brilliant Classics complete Mozart Edition. This, obviously, contains horn concertos, many of them written for the virtuoso horn player Joseph Leutgeb. I quote the liner notes:

In the manuscript of the relatively simple so-called ‘First Concerto’, KV412 (which is in reality Mozart’s last composition for horn, from the year of his death, 1791), the composer even amused himself by writing extremely vulgar comments such as ‘O, your balls have dried up! … Oh you miserable bastard!’ about the horn virtuoso, who was by now sixty years old and weary.

The album contains a rendition of this concerto. But it also contains a second version of one of its movements, identical to the first, except that somebody is reading aloud these vulgar comments as they occur on the manuscript! Talk about embarrassing. Although I suspect Mozart would have laughed his ass off.

Anyway, to be slightly more serious, the way I have pruned my own collection were this. First, I have removed files that obvious doubles of other files, or which contained little or no content. (Such as an essay of which I wrote only the title.) Second, I have removed files or content that was made by other people without the understanding that it would be published. For instance, there’s a document that contains reviews of The Baron. My private version also contains some e-mail conversations about the game, but I’ve removed these from the public release. And that’s it. Some of the unfinishedwork is of less than stellar quality, but hey, that’s why I never finished it. If you delve into dusty corners of the archive, expect to find dust and chaff! I didn’t write any fanfic of questionable legal status, so that’s an issue I didn’t need to deal with.

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Mhm… I see your suggestion.

In theory, after doing a work copy of …/wrk I can remove all those fanfiction and dojinshi, the dabbling with AIF concept (yes, I 'fess THIS), the hardest part, deciding if I should give up on some of the WIP and do an eventual “bowdlerisation” of what remains. But is worth ?

You have worked only with I6 and I7, but in my case I worked with everything:

  $ ls if/wrk/
adl     alan2  dialog  inf52  inf6  INFOCOM  misc  scott   tads2  tst
advsys  alan3  hugo    inf55  inf7  magx     scen  src-i7  tads3  zilf

As you can see, I 'm practically working on all IF engines… and honestly, I think that there’s the only active coding on ADL, AdvSys and magx, and the two Scott Adams format engines (of course the lone allcaps dir will be removed,I feel it’s like publishing graffiti on monuments…)

Your contribuition is useful indeed, but I’m not so sure about an eventual similiar contribuition of mine…

on a minor note, you’re right on quoting Mozart, one of my favorite jab being:

Nearby graffiti “graffiti” Tower
with name “rauchy” “graffiti”,
description “Some rauchy graffiti, written here clearly by an
uncouth sailor of the Napoleonic era, because of some rather strong
comments on Nelson’s opinion on syntax and ~natural language~.^Your
friends proposed that the rather strong graffiti should be covered,
but the very idea of whitewashing a reference to the Holy Cow of past
British ruling of the Waves was rather appalling for the local council,
so we young ladies must endure these words not precisely XXIth Century
politically correct, so to speak.”
! of course, IS a jab on another Nelson…
has scenery;

(needless to say, jab on Inform 7 done with inform 5.5… go figure)

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.