You can now play Desert Adventure online

You can now play Desert Adventure online if you have a Java-capable browser. :)

Click here to play this game

- Sam

MaraDNS snapshot update; Desert Adventure updated

I have uploaded a new snapshot of MaraDNS today. In this updated snapshot, Jean-Jacques Sarto has added support for, and I have documented, FQDN6 records, records that allow you to set up "reverse" and "forward" DNS support for IPV6 addresses.

I have also changed the formatting of the source files: the .c and .h files no longer have tabs, but use multiple spaces instead. This is something I should have done before releasing 1.2; it makes the source code look consistant across different editors. since this change means that it will be more difficult to use patches for older versions of MaraDNS that use tabs instead of spaces. At least I did it before 1.3.

Finally, I have added a few more SQA tests.

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I have also updated my Desert Adventure game. I made one puzzle a little easier and another puzzle a little harder (But help is now available for this harder puzzle). Also, I fixed one bug and revised the compile script to remove more unused whitespace, allowing more adventure to fit in the same amount of space.

In addition, I revised ScottFree to give SavedRoom initial value of 1 and added a z-machine version of Desert Adventure (created with scott2zip, revised by myself, and compiled with an ancient version of Inform) for people who don't feel comfortable compiling ScottFree.

The update is available here (80k zip file).

Desert adventure: A new tiny interactive fiction story

I spent all day yesterday making an interactive fiction story called Desert adventure. This is classic late-1970s early-1980s adventure: Our adventurer is all alone in a desert near an oasis, and has to find the treasures.

This is an original adventure for the Scott Adams' adventure interpreter language, and is, to the extent of my knowledge, the first original adventure for Scott's language in over 20 years.

While Inform, Adrift, and what not are more capable than Scott's language at making complicated adventures, Scott's system has the advantage of being extremely compact, being originally designed to run on a system with only 16 or 24 kilobytes (yes, kilobytes) of memory. For example, my implementation of Cloak of Darkness for Scott's system is under 3,000 bytes in size. Compare this to the Z-machine version of the same game, which is over 50,000 bytes in size.

The program to run Scott Adams' adventures is under 20k in size; the Z machine interpreter is about 80k in size, and other interpreters are even bigger.

My goal in making this adventure was to make a playable, very small adventure that people can freely include with programs like ScottFree.

In particular, I wanted the adventure to fit in under 6 2048-byte blocks (12288 bytes), which it barely does.

To play this game, play it online or download it here (80k zip file). This zipfile includes a Windows program for running Scott Adams adventures, a version of ScottFree for *NIX (including MacOS X in a terminal) updated to not have bugs when compiled in a modern version of GCC, and a z-machine version for people who don't feel comfortable compiling ScottFree.

- Sam

Update: 2007/09/10: Updated version to 1.1 and added note there is now a z-machine version of Desert Adventure. 2007/09/11: Added online version

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