MaraDNS snapshot update; Cloak of Darkeness

I have made an update to the MaraDNS snapshot public today. In this update, I have removed a lot of old cruft from the MaraDNS tree. The biggest savings comes from removing the .pdf manpage reference from the documentation tree; this reference doesn't include the tutorial, so is of limited use. I have also removed some old documents and programs not needed by MaraDNS which haven't been looked at or updated in years.

In addition, bind2csv2.py now has a man page, and the authoritative tutorial has been updated to point out the recursive resolver had dnscache-style custom name servers for subtrees of the DNS space.

Jean-Jacques Sarto has contributed a patch that allows csv2 zone files to have FQDN6 records in in csv2 zone files, for better ipv6 support. I have not integrated this patch yet; I have to make sure he licenses the patch under a MaraDNS compatible license and that the patch doesn't introduce any other bugs.

The September snapshots of MaraDNS can be downloaded here.

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I have had a long-term interest in Interactive Fiction ever since the days of Adventure and Zork in the late 1970s. This weekend, being a little bored, I have ported Cloak of Darkness to the parser Scott Adams used for his late 1970s and early 1980s video games.

I had to do some hacks to pull it off; namely, I have the adventure teleport the player from one room to another instantly under certain circumstances:

• If the player tries to go out in to the street from the foyer, they enter the street. They are then instantly teleported from the street back to the foyer with the "You've only just arrived, and besides, the weather outside seems to be getting worse." message.
  
• If the player has hung up the cloak, and enters the bar, they are instantly teleported from a dark room to the actual bar.

Basically, since Scott Adams' format kills the player if they hit a wall in the dark, I made the bar a dark room with exits in all directions. If they take any of the exits, they go to another dark room and have a 50% chance of messing up the message for every turn they are in the second dark room. Both the first and second dark room's "North" exit takes them back to the foyer.

Another hack is that the Cloak is not a normal pickable (carryable) item. Instead, "drop cloak" is explicitly given two actions:

• Give the player the "This isn't the best place to leave a smart cloak like that lying around!" message in any room besides the cloakroom
  
• Put the cloak on the hook in the cloakroom, and set the flag so the person, when in the dark room, is instantly teleported to the bar.

Also, get cloak when the cloak is in the cloakroom picks up the cloak, and clears the "telport from dark room to bar" flag.

The game makes assumptions that Scott Adams' adventures never had, but it works pretty well. In ScottFree, I never see the teleport. It is possible, were this file used in an actual 1970s computer, that the player might see a brief flash of the room they were teleported from before being teleported.

My port is available in a zipfile, along with a version of the scott2zip converter updated to run in Perl5 and ScottFree updated to not have a bug when compiled in GCC4 (A recent version of the Linux C compiler):

cloak-scott-0.1.zip

The above zipfile can be freely uploaded to the if-archive or anywhere else (I assume Roger Firth allows people to freely distribute implementations of Cloak of Darkness).

I think this is the only new Scott Adams game in over 20 years. Considering how difficult it was to pull off, I can see why no one makes games in this format any more.

- Sam