6 ms·

Your load is too heavy: Zork deep reading

231 points by panic 9y ago

kmill 9y ago
A while back I made a partial emulator for Z5 (a version of the virtual machine Infocom games ran on) that recompiled the game dynamically to Javascript[1], and I remember while pouring over the dumps coming across the fact "You're holding too many things already!" depended by a random number. I never checked whether it could actually fire, though! I assumed it was vestigial, with the "Your load is too heavy" message in the same function. Another quirk I came across was how in the Canyon View, on many emulators when you "climb down" you are greeted with "The xc ec knwall munz doesn't lead downward." It turns out the Solid Gold edition has no name for the "down" object, which probably didn't exist in earlier versions, and emulators don't tend to check the text length field for the object (0 in this case) because the string encoding uses something like null-termination. Text is encoded in 5-bit blocks, explaining how the random data stays within the alphabet. Whatever emulators do, it's still a bug in the game. [1] It was an excuse to figure out how to make an Emscripten-like relooper, to figure out how to simulate blocking calls ("continuations") using exceptions, and to learn about the design of the Z-machine. Edit: I guess I should mention for the "xc ec knwall munz" quirk that the directions are all objects, and "climb" is meant for ropes and stairs. I believe what is happening is that you can go down in the Canyon view, but "down" isn't the vehicle which will carry you there.
- duskwuff 9y ago
  Infocom's games handled compass directions strangely -- they were treated like omnipresent objects. In some versions of Zork, you could give a direction (like "east") to a hungry troll, who would proceed to eat it. This, among many other bizarre bugs, is documented at: http://graeme.50webs.com/infobugs/zork1.htm http://graeme.50webs.com/infobugs/zork1.htm
  - cjsawyer 9y ago
    As an aspiring game designer who has never played Zork: that list was fascinating.
  - wolfgang42 9y ago
    Directions-as-objects seems to be a common pattern. LambdaCore does the same thing, though LambdaMOO later added a Generic Detailed Room with basic support for directions, so a separate object wasn't required. (Anything more sophisticated than "go west" still requires a separate door object.) In addition to missing checks causing unexpected interactions, this approach also has the problem that the two ends can become asymmetrical, causing confusion (though this may be desired e.g. in the case of a trap-door). In the case of LambdaMOO, there's an entry northwest from the living room to the kitchen, but no corresponding entry southeast in the other direction!
    - jandrese 9y ago
      Asymmetrical navigation was definitely used as a game element. "You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike".
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- jacobush 9y ago
  Only two hits on Google for "xc ec knwall munz", one which is your post here. Color me impressed.
cyberferret 9y ago
Amazing! All those times I went adventuring carrying too little... I should have just tried 'take x' again! There is a type of ironic zen lesson in all of this somewhere...
afro88 9y ago
Honestly, this is actually kind of neat. I mean, if I'm carrying too many things in real life, I will probably not be able to pick something else up. But if I try again a few times I may be able to fit it or grasp it somehow. The probability of this working decreases depending on the number of items over my "easy to carry" limit. That's a cool detail.
- WovenTales 9y ago
  Definitely, though the Zork 3 message still sounds like such a better way of letting you know what's happening.
hoodoof 9y ago
Zork is smarter than Siri.
sethammons 9y ago
One of my favorite memories of zork, after giving up once, was something very similar to: Kill self > With what? Self > You don't have the you.
jonasmst 9y ago
Off topic, but the way the mobile version of this site steals left- and right swipes makes a terrible UX.
criddell 9y ago
When I was a teenager, I loved the Infocom games. I actually called a tip line once or twice to get unstuck. I would spend hours playing through, taking notes, and mapping my progress. I also loved stuff that came in the boxes. It has a similar nostalgia pull that I think some people get from vinyl records. When the BBC put the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy online [1], I loaded it up and went to work. Then I quit after about 15 minutes. I'd love to watch my 14 year old self working his way through that game. Did I have better focus? Did I have fewer things to spend my time on? Why was it so captivating then? It seems almost arduous today. Have you played an Infocom game after a 30 year break? How did it go for you? [1]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN2PLZG/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-game-30th-anniversary-edition http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN2...
- syntheticnature 9y ago
  I think the issue is that the games tended towards Guide Dang It, as tvtropes.org puts it. You basically needed to scoop up everything you saw and try it in random, often nonsensical combinations (e.g. getting the Babel fish) -- all to extend the time spent playing. As a teenager it was easy to spend a pile of time on, but as an adult this bears entirely too much similarity to various unpleasant things, most of which actually advance you in your life (unlike playing a game that, I presume, you bested as a 14-year-old).
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    My experience is that I remembered how to solve all the puzzles, so all the challenge was gone. It was basically an exercise in nostalgia. As for the Babel fish, while the actions required seemed nonsensical, they were each clued by the previous press of the vending machine button. It was an interactive Rube Goldberg machine. But yes, if you didn't think in exactly the same way the puzzle designer thought you would, you had to resort to combining every object in your inventory with every object in the room in order to progress. More modern IF games are actually a lot better about not being Guide Dang It, so it's really a shame there's no market for them any more. Nelson and Plotkin are pretty good about trying to make things sensible and solvable, most of the time. For instance, there are many different ways to open the pill bottle in Curses--ways based on common sense--not just the one where you find the pill-bottle-opening-machine in the goblin lair, insert the "E" battery that you removed from a malfunctioning weather radio, and press the "open pill bottle" button, instead of one of the 999 "kill player horribly" buttons, because you read the goblin language primer at the public library that only had two books in it. (That is not in Curses, it's just an example of how Infocom might have scripted it.)
megamindbrian 9y ago
Proof looking at code makes things less fun?
lobster_johnson 9y ago
While I've always loved the Infocom games, I was partial to Magnetic Scrolls: The Pawn, Guild of Thieves, Jinxter and so on. Magnetic Scrolls games came with a little bit of graphics (or, in the case of the later Wonderland game, a whole graphics environment, including a visual inventory you could drag stuff around in), and also had a more sophisticated parser. For example, if you had a green bottle and a brown bottle you could do something like: > put water in bottle Which bottle? > green The green bottle is now filled with water. This also worked with modifiers in-sentence ("put water in the blue bottle"), and it could handle complex sentences like: "go southeast and get the harmonica and the bottle and then get the knife that is on the table and use the knife to cut the sandwich". The internal data model was also more abstract, and therefore more flexible. For example [1], if you needed to cut something, you could use anything that was sharp enough, because the data model didn't require a specific object. If you had a knife, you could cut a rope, but if you also had a vase, you could break the vase, then use one of the shards to cut the rope with. All the Magnetic Scrolls games are playable today on many platforms through Magnetic [2], and you can find the files online. The original Magnetic Scrolls developers were able to recover the old source code from tapes [3] and will be remastering the other games, and releasing the code. A remastered version [4] of The Pawn came out recently for multiple platforms, including mobile. [1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/4760332/In-my-opinion-What-are-you-made-of.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/4760332/In-my-opinion-... [2] http://msmemorial.if-legends.org/magnetic.php http://msmemorial.if-legends.org/magnetic.php [3] https://strandgames.com/blog/magnetic-scrolls-games-source-code-recovered https://strandgames.com/blog/magnetic-scrolls-games-source-c... [4] https://strandgames.com/games/thePawn https://strandgames.com/games/thePawn
- svachalek 9y ago
  Ah, I'd forgotten about those. I saw the ads as a kid and was interested but never got a chance to play any of them. This does remind me of The Hobbit, though, which seems to have some similar features: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_(1982_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_(1982_video_game)
  - lobster_johnson 9y ago
radnor 9y ago
Obligatory link to the Eaten By A Grue podcast, where the hosts play old Infocom games and talk about them. The first podcast is, of course, Zork. http://monsterfeet.com/grue/ http://monsterfeet.com/grue/
oldpond 9y ago
I played this on the mainframe in the early 90's while mounting tapes on the night shift. It was hard. I cheated. I looked at the source code for the key to get out of the twisty little maze. Wonderful stuff.

231 points by panic 9y ago

A while back I made a partial emulator for Z5 (a version of the virtual machine Infocom games ran on) that recompiled the game dynamically to Javascript[1], and I remember while pouring over the dumps coming across the fact "You're holding too many things already!" depended by a random number. I never checked whether it could actually fire, though! I assumed it was vestigial, with the "Your load is too heavy" message in the same function. Another quirk I came across was how in the Canyon View, on many emulators when you "climb down" you are greeted with "The xc ec knwall munz doesn't lead downward." It turns out the Solid Gold edition has no name for the "down" object, which probably didn't exist in earlier versions, and emulators don't tend to check the text length field for the object (0 in this case) because the string encoding uses something like null-termination. Text is encoded in 5-bit blocks, explaining how the random data stays within the alphabet. Whatever emulators do, it's still a bug in the game. [1] It was an excuse to figure out how to make an Emscripten-like relooper, to figure out how to simulate blocking calls ("continuations") using exceptions, and to learn about the design of the Z-machine. Edit: I guess I should mention for the "xc ec knwall munz" quirk that the directions are all objects, and "climb" is meant for ropes and stairs. I believe what is happening is that you can go down in the Canyon view, but "down" isn't the vehicle which will carry you there.

duskwuff 9y ago
Infocom's games handled compass directions strangely -- they were treated like omnipresent objects. In some versions of Zork, you could give a direction (like "east") to a hungry troll, who would proceed to eat it. This, among many other bizarre bugs, is documented at: http://graeme.50webs.com/infobugs/zork1.htm http://graeme.50webs.com/infobugs/zork1.htm
- cjsawyer 9y ago
  As an aspiring game designer who has never played Zork: that list was fascinating.
- wolfgang42 9y ago
  Directions-as-objects seems to be a common pattern. LambdaCore does the same thing, though LambdaMOO later added a Generic Detailed Room with basic support for directions, so a separate object wasn't required. (Anything more sophisticated than "go west" still requires a separate door object.) In addition to missing checks causing unexpected interactions, this approach also has the problem that the two ends can become asymmetrical, causing confusion (though this may be desired e.g. in the case of a trap-door). In the case of LambdaMOO, there's an entry northwest from the living room to the kitchen, but no corresponding entry southeast in the other direction!
  - jandrese 9y ago
    Asymmetrical navigation was definitely used as a game element. "You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike".
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
jacobush 9y ago
Only two hits on Google for "xc ec knwall munz", one which is your post here. Color me impressed.

cyberferret 9y ago

Amazing! All those times I went adventuring carrying too little... I should have just tried 'take x' again! There is a type of ironic zen lesson in all of this somewhere...

afro88 9y ago

Honestly, this is actually kind of neat. I mean, if I'm carrying too many things in real life, I will probably not be able to pick something else up. But if I try again a few times I may be able to fit it or grasp it somehow. The probability of this working decreases depending on the number of items over my "easy to carry" limit. That's a cool detail.

WovenTales 9y ago
Definitely, though the Zork 3 message still sounds like such a better way of letting you know what's happening.

hoodoof 9y ago

Zork is smarter than Siri.

sethammons 9y ago

One of my favorite memories of zork, after giving up once, was something very similar to: Kill self > With what? Self > You don't have the you.

jonasmst 9y ago

Off topic, but the way the mobile version of this site steals left- and right swipes makes a terrible UX.

criddell 9y ago

When I was a teenager, I loved the Infocom games. I actually called a tip line once or twice to get unstuck. I would spend hours playing through, taking notes, and mapping my progress. I also loved stuff that came in the boxes. It has a similar nostalgia pull that I think some people get from vinyl records. When the BBC put the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy online [1], I loaded it up and went to work. Then I quit after about 15 minutes. I'd love to watch my 14 year old self working his way through that game. Did I have better focus? Did I have fewer things to spend my time on? Why was it so captivating then? It seems almost arduous today. Have you played an Infocom game after a 30 year break? How did it go for you? [1]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN2PLZG/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-game-30th-anniversary-edition http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN2...

syntheticnature 9y ago
I think the issue is that the games tended towards Guide Dang It, as tvtropes.org puts it. You basically needed to scoop up everything you saw and try it in random, often nonsensical combinations (e.g. getting the Babel fish) -- all to extend the time spent playing. As a teenager it was easy to spend a pile of time on, but as an adult this bears entirely too much similarity to various unpleasant things, most of which actually advance you in your life (unlike playing a game that, I presume, you bested as a 14-year-old).
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  My experience is that I remembered how to solve all the puzzles, so all the challenge was gone. It was basically an exercise in nostalgia. As for the Babel fish, while the actions required seemed nonsensical, they were each clued by the previous press of the vending machine button. It was an interactive Rube Goldberg machine. But yes, if you didn't think in exactly the same way the puzzle designer thought you would, you had to resort to combining every object in your inventory with every object in the room in order to progress. More modern IF games are actually a lot better about not being Guide Dang It, so it's really a shame there's no market for them any more. Nelson and Plotkin are pretty good about trying to make things sensible and solvable, most of the time. For instance, there are many different ways to open the pill bottle in Curses--ways based on common sense--not just the one where you find the pill-bottle-opening-machine in the goblin lair, insert the "E" battery that you removed from a malfunctioning weather radio, and press the "open pill bottle" button, instead of one of the 999 "kill player horribly" buttons, because you read the goblin language primer at the public library that only had two books in it. (That is not in Curses, it's just an example of how Infocom might have scripted it.)

megamindbrian 9y ago

Proof looking at code makes things less fun?

lobster_johnson 9y ago

While I've always loved the Infocom games, I was partial to Magnetic Scrolls: The Pawn, Guild of Thieves, Jinxter and so on. Magnetic Scrolls games came with a little bit of graphics (or, in the case of the later Wonderland game, a whole graphics environment, including a visual inventory you could drag stuff around in), and also had a more sophisticated parser. For example, if you had a green bottle and a brown bottle you could do something like: > put water in bottle Which bottle? > green The green bottle is now filled with water. This also worked with modifiers in-sentence ("put water in the blue bottle"), and it could handle complex sentences like: "go southeast and get the harmonica and the bottle and then get the knife that is on the table and use the knife to cut the sandwich". The internal data model was also more abstract, and therefore more flexible. For example [1], if you needed to cut something, you could use anything that was sharp enough, because the data model didn't require a specific object. If you had a knife, you could cut a rope, but if you also had a vase, you could break the vase, then use one of the shards to cut the rope with. All the Magnetic Scrolls games are playable today on many platforms through Magnetic [2], and you can find the files online. The original Magnetic Scrolls developers were able to recover the old source code from tapes [3] and will be remastering the other games, and releasing the code. A remastered version [4] of The Pawn came out recently for multiple platforms, including mobile. [1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/4760332/In-my-opinion-What-are-you-made-of.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/4760332/In-my-opinion-... [2] http://msmemorial.if-legends.org/magnetic.php http://msmemorial.if-legends.org/magnetic.php [3] https://strandgames.com/blog/magnetic-scrolls-games-source-code-recovered https://strandgames.com/blog/magnetic-scrolls-games-source-c... [4] https://strandgames.com/games/thePawn https://strandgames.com/games/thePawn

svachalek 9y ago
Ah, I'd forgotten about those. I saw the ads as a kid and was interested but never got a chance to play any of them. This does remind me of The Hobbit, though, which seems to have some similar features: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_(1982_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_(1982_video_game)
- lobster_johnson 9y ago

radnor 9y ago

Obligatory link to the Eaten By A Grue podcast, where the hosts play old Infocom games and talk about them. The first podcast is, of course, Zork. http://monsterfeet.com/grue/ http://monsterfeet.com/grue/

oldpond 9y ago

I played this on the mainframe in the early 90's while mounting tapes on the night shift. It was hard. I cheated. I looked at the source code for the key to get out of the twisty little maze. Wonderful stuff.