DiMono
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Mattcrampy wrote:

Sokko wrote:
even Flaming Pits of Mothingness.

We're going to have to work out what the flaming pit of mothingness is at some point. Maybe it's the mole?

Matt

I'd think it's just like a regular pit of mothingness, but more... happy.

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Sokko
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Mothingness is a thing of such indescribable terror that it's simply... uh, impossible to describe. I've already thought of a nice plot point to go along with it, in fact. And it's quite a major one, though it won't feature until sometime in the third quarter of the game. Aside from being in the plot point, Flaming Pits of Mothingness can be found in certain places on the Plains, though no one has ever really lived long enough down there to come back up and confirm everyone's fears.

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Sokko
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Okay, though I am using CAT for now, I'm pretty much hating every minute of it. It has extremely half-assed text formatting (no hard returns, bold/italics must apply to all the rest of the text, etc.), its room editor is not to die for (so, does this room lead north to Location 13, or Location 29?), and it's not as user-friendly as it appeared at first glance. I could easily continue, but it definitely wouldn't be fun, and if it's not fun, my chances of finishing it drop from 99% to about 20%.

Erik, I gravel at your feet. I haven't done much so far, and until I do I can't really be sure what's to come, as I explained before. To this end, I've sent you three things. The first is a copy of all the room descriptions I did before ADRIFT decided to tell me about the registration thing. Ignore the extension and just open it in notepad, it's a direct Export from ADRIFT. The second is four pictures from my crappy digital camera that show the maps I've drawn up for the locations included in the demo (and one that isn't). No, that's not the entire first level of Dugan's; it's just the part that's not initially blocked off with Plot Boulders. I also just forgot to include the Smitemasters' Guild Meeting Hall; I think I'll put it somewhere in Dugan's castle if you don't mind. The third and final item is a semi-design document that shows my (pretty much set in stone) short-term plans for the demo, and then my (quite vague) long-term plans for the full game. Grovel, grovel.

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ErikH2000
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Sokko wrote:
Erik, I gravel at your feet.

Hey, knock that off! I don't want you getting gravel all over the carpet.

I'll set you up with Adrift a bit later.

-Erik

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ErikH2000
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Hey, I got to the Adrift website once, www.adrift.org.uk) but it looks like it's been down for the last few days. When it comes up again, I should be able to figure out how to get a registered copy.

Also, I am moving this topic to the "Development" board.

-Erik

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Sokko
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You have my very deepest thanks. Rest assured that I will never, ever drop this project until it's done, no matter how long it takes.

Hey, I got to the Adrift website once www.adrift.org.uk), but it looks like it's been down for the last few days. When it comes up again, I should be able to figure out how to get a registered copy.

Yeah, that's weird, it's not working for me either. It was running fine yesterday, though.

Also, I am moving this topic to the "Development" board.

Suits me just fine; I realized a bit after I started it that it didn't really belong in "Anything".

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ErikH2000
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Sokko wrote:
You have my very deepest thanks. Rest assured that I will never, ever drop this project until it's done, no matter how long it takes.

Okay, no problem. I'm not going to be hurt if you end up dropping the project for some reason, but it would be much better of course if you got it done. My advice for finishing the game is just to keep it simple.

-Erik


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DiMono
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My advice is to make a list of the things you want to do in the game, and check them off as you do them. And make the first item Make a list, so you can check something off immediately and get a boost of encouragement

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Sokko
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My development style usually doesn't call for list-making, but hey, I made that semi-development document so I guess anything's possible. Also, thank you Erik for the advice on keeping it simple. K.I.S.S., as they say.

In other news, adrift.org.uk is back up again. My guess is that it was maintenance.

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MartianInvader
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File: text.zip (604.7 KB)
Downloaded 68 times.
License: Other
From: Unspecified

Sokko, I may be able to help you.

A couple of years ago, I developed a text-adventure game engine and map editor (yes, there have been times in my life when I had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do). This engine allows for rooms, items, inventory, variables, and some other stuff. I didn't spend as much time on the editor, but it is functional if not user-friendly. I've attached it with a really simple test game, so go ahead and give it a try. Mainprog.exe is the game, so just put it in a directory with the other files and run it. The main drawback to this engine is you can only enter up to four words for a command, but I've found that to usually be plenty. If you like how it plays, post back and I'll let you know more about how the game and the editor works.
Hopefully, this can help you focus less on programming and more on developing the story.

Edit: Whoops, I put up the engine with the wrong map. Here's the real one, the other one was sort of a nonsensical test for the test map.

[Edited by MartianInvader on 02-01-2004 at 03:47 AM GMT]

[Edited by MartianInvader on 02-01-2004 at 03:49 AM GMT]

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DiMono
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Really classy dude, I salute you. I also noticed that in text-based games, like the old Sierra "Quest" games, most commands weren't more than 4 words if stated carefully. Leave out "the" and you get fine. Only potential problem is a situation like this:

Inventory:
Dagger
Rusty Dagger

Command:
Put Rusty Dagger In Pot

Though you can still get by this by using underscores in the item names instead of spaces.

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Sokko
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If it was 1988, you could make a lot of money off of that. Well, maybe not quite a lot, but it's still very interesting for a home-made thingamabobber. Though... what's this about helping me? I've already gotten all the help I need, at least for now; things are looking up!

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ErikH2000
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Sokko, I mailed you registration info three days ago to s...@hotmail.com, but there's something screwy going on. Failed delivery with this message:

"Unable to deliver message to the following recipients, due to being unable to connect successfully to the destination mail server."

I can try it again, or I can use a different e-mail address, or I can PM you. Let me know!

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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MartianInvader
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Whoops! I posted the wrong map file up for the text engine. I've edited it to be the actual test game, which demonstrates most of what the engine can do.

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Sokko
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Try it again, and make sure it's sokko87 at hotmail dot com. Usually the only reason it will fail is because you sent it to an address that doesn't exist; not that I'm insulting your spelling or anything, but typos are easy enough to make (guilty on all counts ). So far as I know, there's nothing on the Hotmail server that simply chucks out "junk" email before it even gets to you; it always goes in the Junk Mail folder. If you're absolutely sure you spelled it right that time, just PM me; I have no other email addresses, which is both a good thing and a bad thing.

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ErikH2000
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Sokko wrote:
Try it again, and make sure it's sokko87 at hotmail dot com. Usually the only reason it will fail is because you sent it to an address that doesn't exist; not that I'm insulting your spelling or anything, but typos are easy enough to make (guilty on all counts ).

Nope, address was right. There was something screwy with their servers. Had difficulties e-mailing to Mike around the same time.

I sent it again. Will also PM you.

-Erik


____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

Sokko
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Weird. Oh well, now it's back to normal again and, more importantly, I can officially resume work. Yes, I was "unofficially" working on it from time to time, because you can still "save" after a fashion by exporting it to a module, then re-importing it to load. But now I will push onwards with full force, or as much force as I can while doing piles of schoolwork. Hopefully you'll get your demo soon enough.

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Sokko
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Development progress:

|||||||||| 100% of demo rooms completed
|||||----- 50% of demo items programmed
|||------- 33% of demo characters programmed
||-------- 15% of demo tasks/events done

Problems encountered today: I discovered that characters don't have states, meaning that you can't have a state where a character is facing one way and another when he's facing another way, and only have a task be completable if he's facing one of those ways. The only solution is to create two events that are timed so they occur one on every turn, swapping with each other. Events can't set variables or object states, so I have to create a placeholder object and two placeholder rooms for the events to move it between; the objective task then checks to see which room it's currently in and awards completion if the object is in the room that corresponds to the correct direction of the character. Wow, that's complicated. Another problem I ran into is that while it's possible to make the game speak in the third person, i.e. "Beethro takes the sword" rather than "You take the sword", however it still uses the same verb forms as if it were talking in the second person, so the above instead becomes "Beethro take the sword". Attempting to use an ALR file has proven fruitless, for some odd reason. I tried to replace "Beethro take" with "Beethro takes", instead of just replacing all instances of "take" with "takes", because there might be somewhere I need to use "take" in a sentence. It failed, and I have no idea why.

Onwards and upwards!

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jdyer
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It's quite possible to make bundled versions of Inform, TADS, and Hugo games. Guilty Bastards (a Hugo game) had a great many downloads from download.com for a while in a bundled version.

(Sorry I'm too late though -- that's what I get for not looking at this forum earlier, gah.)

However, you must realize the interactive fiction community has a *wide* range of platforms -- we're talking even Acorns here -- so platform independence is key.

This is also to save on downloading, of course. If you want an analogy, imagine packaging the entire game of DROD with every hold you create.

Even Adrift games tend not to be made as complete package downloads.

Sokko
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I'm still deciding on distribution techniques. On the one hand, I don't want to make the file size too large, but on the other hand, I don't want to send people scurrying around to various web pages downloading whatever interpreter meets their platform needs. As for the game itself, I'm going for no external resources whatsoever; just the one file. Might be tough at some points, but I'm sure I can wrangle it.

Okay, I'm REALLY done with the rooms now. I previously said I was done with the demo rooms, but there was a whole 'nother room set that I completely forgot about, so here I am after another hour or so of typing. The rooms are the hardest part, especially coming up with adjectives you haven't used a hundred times before. Thesauruses (thesauri?) help immensely. Once you've got the rooms done, the rest is, comparatively, a piece of cake.

Sorry I can't get a map up here for you guys; the mapping engine defies any attempt to get it to render properly, so I guess it's my quantum room links. Even so, it does look pretty impressive for a demo. *does a room count* 39 rooms total, not counting the various placeholder rooms I use for list dividers and character states; those would bring it to 45.

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Mattcrampy
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There's a couple of megs in the files folder here on the site with your name on it. I don't think there'll be any arguments about that. No? No? Good.

Matt

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Sokko
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I believe what I meant in the above post was "not too large for the dial-up users among us", and not "not too large for any web hosting solution I might have on hand", though DROD.net works for me. I'll just stick up copies of the ADRIFT and SCARE interpreters. SCARE is only pre-compiled for Linux, so Mac users will have to compile it themselves or locate an emulator. I'm not too worried about that, though.

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ErikH2000
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Sokko wrote:
I believe what I meant in the above post was "not too large for the dial-up users among us", and not "not too large for any web hosting solution I might have on hand", though DROD.net works for me. I'll just stick up copies of the ADRIFT and SCARE interpreters. SCARE is only pre-compiled for Linux, so Mac users will have to compile it themselves or locate an emulator. I'm not too worried about that, though.

Your idea to include links to the ADRIFT and SCARE interpreters seems quite reasonable. I'm a tad reluctant to host the actual files for these on DROD.net. Probably doesn't matter, but it's a larger download and could contribute to more bandwidth usage than we want. The ADRIFT game file on the other hand is tiny, so I don't worry about it. You might just deeplink to the interpreters. Since they are hosted in a file archive, nobody's feelings will get hurt if you just include a link like:

ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/programming/adrift/ADRIFT40r.zip

Anyhow, this stuff is all easy to figure out.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

Sokko
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The ADRIFT interpreter is rather large at 2.39MB, but SCARE is miniscule in the low 100Kb range. If someone could compile SCARE on a Windows platform, we'd be all set for file sizes and suchlike.

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Sokko
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Your demo is aaaaallllmost ready. It's currently in the internal testing phase; if it passes muster with me, then it'll go out to the forum critics. There's still a few things that are niggling me; mainly the fact that ADRIFT insists on using the second-person form of verbs even when I set it in third-person mode, i.e. "Beethro take the sword" rather than "Beethro takes the sword". I might just revert all of these to "You" in a future version, since in this game you are supposed to play as Beethro, after all. For some reason I think it might bring up some awkward situations, but it's something to think about.

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Sokko
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Testing is almost finished! I exterminated all but one of the major bugs, and discovered several little ones along the way. The one bug that's left I'm not even sure is still there; more testing is needed to determine that, and I certainly hope it's gone because if it's not, I have no idea what's causing it. If all goes well, you should have a demo in your hands by tomorrow afternoon.

P.S. There's a little secret in the demo that will be familiar to those of you who know about Thy Dungeonman. I will say no more.

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Sokko
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Finally, the last remnants of bugs have been squashed, and the demo has arrived! Sorry it took so long. Take a gander at the modified first post to see what you need to do to play it, then give me some feedback or something. For me, I think a short rest break is in order.

Tally: 47 rooms, 9 objects, 32 tasks, 3 events, 6 characters, 1 variable, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Just a little note: It's highly recommended that you turn on "Verbose" mode, so you see the room description every time you enter it. Otherwise, you won't see important items that are on the ground! (in ADRIFT Runner this is accomplished by checking Options > Verbose)


Since the secret is a bit hard to get to, I'll give you another hint. Highlight below to read, but only once you've played through the demo!



For those interested, the secret doesn't actually do anything. It's just a fun little doodad I thought I would put in for good measure.

[Edited by Sokko on 02-27-2004 at 09:59 PM GMT]

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Scott
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When I try and run run400.exe I get an error that zlibtool.ocx is missing. I can continue running it though by ignoring the error. However when I then try and load the adventure I get the following error.

Error loading adventure - [Application-defined or object-defined error,399,51]

Edit: forgot to mention running on windows xp pro.

[Edited by Scott on 02-28-2004 at 12:52 AM GMT]

joker5
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Yeah, I can't run ADRIFT either.

~joker5

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joker5
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All right, I found a version of ADRIFT. Now

~joker5

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