11 ms·

What is ZIL anyway?

204 points by MrRadar 7y ago

bayesian_horse 7y ago
Maybe there can be a new golden age of interactive fiction using modern NLP and other AI related technologies?
- jordanpg 7y ago
  I enjoy thinking about the future of IF. I see it as a gaming/storytelling medium with a simultaneously huge potential but still vast chasms to cross before it gets there. NLP etc. has great potential to improve the parsing capabilities, to be sure, but it's not obvious to me that that will dramatically improve the experience. Is `pick up the shiny brass thing` really better than `GET LAMP`? IMO, it might make IF more accessible to non-techy, non-text parser gamers, but that's about it. I think the next leap for IF games will involve non-linear stories that are better suited to the medium. The success of games like "Papers, Please" in particular has sparked my imagination in this area.
  - willvarfar 7y ago
    I recall a Ludum Dare entrant which was an android app that pretended to be a walkie-talkie to control some security operatives you were telling to search a building to investigate some noises. Very spooky. And a very good use of some basic voice parsing and NLP.
    - reificator 7y ago
      Link please? That is an incredibly ambitious concept for a game jam, but it sounds like they pulled it off?
      - klodolph 7y ago
        Game jams are literally the best time to try risky concepts. If it fails, you’ve spent only a small amount of time, and there’s a good chance that people will play your game and give you feedback. I can’t think of a better time to take a risk. (Note: Parent comment edited risky -> ambitious.)
        reificator 7y ago
        I didn't mean it was a risk in any negative sense. I was just looking for the word "ambitious" and couldn't find it in my sleep deprived state... Seriously, I'm so tired I looked up "ballsy thesaurus" and clicked related words for probably five minutes before I gave up looking and just typed 'risky' hoping it'd be good enough.
      - willvarfar 7y ago
        Googling found it http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=8342 http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid... The gameplay video is awesome. But perhaps not so much NLP... this was 2012! Was it really that long ago? And my memory was fuzzy. But just imagine what could be possible!
  - PaulHoule 7y ago
    Inform 7 lets you write games in a language that reads like English even if it doesn't write like English.
  - alchemism 7y ago
    The most memorable IF I’ve played through was one[1] in which you were a captured spy being interrogated in semi-linear fashion. The game was a retelling of your capture, where every wrong choice amounted to ‘It could not have happened that way, go back and tell me what you really did.’ The only way to win was to slip one lie into the retelling, and then when the game catches up to the present moment... [1]Spider and Web
    - gjm11 7y ago
      Written by Andrew "Zarf" Plotkin, the person whose blog post about ZIL this is all a discussion of.
  - Zanni 7y ago
    Struggling with the limitations of the parser was one of the recurring frustrations with Infocom games. "GET LAMP" is fine, but anything more complex quickly becomes challenging. I remember getting stuck in "The Lurking Horror" because I couldn't figure out how to climb down off a ledge, despite having a ladder. Use ladder? Climb ladder? Climb down? Climb down with ladder? Climb ledge with ladder?
    - Drdrdrq 7y ago
      So... What was it? :)
- msla 7y ago
  The problem to solve is game length and replayability. If you don't make moon logic puzzles, your puzzles can be solved relatively quickly unless you're very, very good at making fair puzzles which are also legitimately difficult. Therefore, you're going to need more puzzles than an FPS or action game which incidentally has some puzzles in order to achieve the same total game length, and making content like that is legitimately hard. Similarly, in order to make your games playable more than once, you need branching paths, such that you have different routes for the players to go down each time, and I really shouldn't need to explain the concept of "combinatorial explosion" in this forum. Add to that the expense of things like art assents and voice acting (unless you really think text adventures are going to come back in a big way) and it becomes prohibitively expensive to not railroad everyone down one main plot with, at most, a few minor side-treks which quickly rejoin the main line.
  - PaulHoule 7y ago
    I want a procedurally generated version of Danganronpa.
  - zantana 7y ago
    I do think there is a Sturgeon's Law problem where it's hard enough to come up with linear stories which are compelling. Based on some of the experimentalism in modern day game development in places like ichi.io hopefully they can come with some compelling genres I'm not going to go down some half finished path in Bandersnatch when Black Mirror has enough problem with single stories.
  - jordanpg 7y ago
    This is why I think the "Papers, Please" paradigm is so interesting. The overall storyline is replaced with a repetitive but novel task with increasing difficultly, and various other loosely coupled storylines are grafted onto the task in different ways. The task also replaces the explicit puzzles. It is as though rather than being told the story, you are viewing vignettes of the story through a very narrow window
  - bayesian_horse 7y ago
    The reason why IF Games are so focused on puzzles is that they essential can't do anything else. Even dialogs are either about solving a puzzle or choosing a branch in the story. The point about AI in IF would be to break that mold. Dialogs can be more challenging, for example you could make a game about interrogating people. Or you could tell NPCs to do certain stuff for you. Or these NPCs could have some advanced planning or decision making. To make IF more interesting, especially for those outside a very narrow niche, you would need them to be a lot easier to navigate, and offer more challenges that don't look like puzzles and don't hit you with a brain-twister at every turn.
- sehugg 7y ago
  Versu was one such attempt, with an engine designed by the Sims 3 AI developer: https://versu.com/about/ https://versu.com/about/ Though I'd guess that's more of a sophisticated GOFAI than RNNs.
- blacksmith_tb 7y ago
  Seems like smart speakers are a good fit, my eight year old spent a little while playing with an IF Alexa skill not long ago. Of course, backtracking leads to a lot of agonizing repetition, which isn't really different than seeing it in text, but at least there you can skim over descriptions you've already seen.
  - egypturnash 7y ago
    This is why "verbose/brief/superbrief" became a thing in IF. Verbose: Always show the full description of a room when you enter it. Brief: Show a short description when you re-enter a room. Superbrief: Always show the short description. (Regardless of which you chose, you could always 'look' to get a full description.)
- imglorp 7y ago
  I love this idea, but encourage people not to get hung up on the UI--ie how you interact with the game world--and instead think about what's going on in the game world. What if the world included a number of fully independent agents with their own motivations, values, and policies and equipped with pattern matching, goal solving, optimization, and even a hint of common sense[1]. The game state would never be the same twice, and it would depend on how you interacted with the agents and they with each other. TlDr: If you open a door, you might let the Grue out of its maze. [1] https://github.com/AndrewSmart/opencyc https://github.com/AndrewSmart/opencyc
  - bayesian_horse 7y ago
    I would suggest dialogs as the main focus for AI. I don't believe "complex and dynamic" NPCs would work well enough to make a fun game.
  - egypturnash 7y ago
    I suspect that making it not feel like you're pushing buttons to get the same lines of dialogue out of wandering bots is going to require solving some pretty hard AI problems. You could probably make it work now with, say, a game world full of broken robots or something.
- gmueckl 7y ago
  Well, I would like to think that the ties of interactive fiction to text as the mode of interaction are likely the first to be broken. Both speech recognition and speech synthesis have progressed by leaps and bounds. Computer graphics have progressed to a point where human characters can be made expressive and nuanced. Imagine an engine that that takes games scripted as interactive fiction, procedurally generates the game world from the prose (far fetched, but first steps exist as research papers), populates it with the characters from the text and makes them act out the written dialog while honoring the implicit stage directions given in the written form ("he whispers in your ear" etc...). All of that presented in VR, which would make having a dialog with these virtual characters more natural. Looking at the tech that exists today, I believe that we are about halfway there.
mruts 7y ago
It seems like MDL uses both greater/less than and parens. Is this analogous to Scheme using both brackets and parens? That is, just for readability?
- jerf 7y ago
  It was the early 80s. Readability wouldn't be invented for about another 20 years or so. Actually kinda serious. You need to be able to spare the RAM to have the comments, whitespace, large variables, breaking things nicely into functions, etc. I've got modules I've documented where the documentation alone would fail to fit into, say, a Commodore 64's RAM, as plain text. Early 1980s "big iron" would still be considered on the high end of embedded programming today. (In the sense that a Raspberry Pi is embedded programming.)
  - blattimwind 7y ago
    That's a really interesting perspective. If I think about it an application really doesn't need to be large or complex at all to accrue a couple hundred kB of source code, libraries not included.
  - abecedarius 7y ago
    They developed these on a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10. It's not like they were editing/compiling on the C64. Of course targeting small systems does influence the coding style, but...
    - jerf 7y ago
      A top-end PDP, according to that page, could address ~8MB, though I'm sure they didn't have it for a while; other charts on the internet suggest a top-end PDP-10 would get up to 33 mega Hz. 8MB for an embedded controller is no great ask and you have to crawl a ways down the spec sheet pile to get a 33MHz processor nowadays. A top-end PDP-10 would today put it roughly on par with an Arduino [1], although the Arduino would be a bit short on RAM. Even if you have the space to spare on comments and long variable names, you've been raised in a culture that considers those insanely expensive extravagances. [1]: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Products/Compare https://www.arduino.cc/en/Products/Compare
lousken 7y ago
FYI the article is not about ZFS ZIL but Zork Implementation Language
- chungy 7y ago
  I too assumed this was going to be about the ZFS Intent Log.
Nanocurrency 7y ago
ZIL is also the gas of Zilliqa, a smart contract platform. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/zilliqa/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/zilliqa/
- egypturnash 7y ago
  I know all of these words except for “Zilliqua” but I do not understand this sentence.
  - merlincorey 7y ago
    It appears to be some kind of ethereum-like-but-different cryptocurrency focused on smart contracts (as opposed to a general computer that can implement smart contraccts).
- taradinoc 7y ago
  Yes, it's a cruel twist of fate that all this news about Infocom's ZIL is happening shortly after the launch of a cryptocurrency called "ZIL", in the same month as a conference called "Infocom". Twitter search has been useless.
zzo38computer 7y ago
I have not programmed in ZIL or Inform, but have made implementations of Z-machine, as well as a "Tricky Document" describing various optimizations that can be used in a Z-machine code (such as Black-Johansen text packing, the SET->BCOM optimization, storing introduction text in the input buffer, etc).
- taradinoc 7y ago
  Do you like this?
  - zzo38computer 7y ago
    I like Tricky Document; that is why I wrote it. (Or do you mean something else? If you mean ZIL, well, then I don't know a lot about that.)
linsomniac 7y ago
What does this have to do with the Zfs Intent Log?!? :-)
- myself248 7y ago
  That's what I thought I was coming here to read about. HN article titles are the worst.
kmill 7y ago
Looking through a bunch of code in the archive, it was interesting to come across the macro for TELL, which is used everywhere in games as a sort of printf, and it has some special printf-like codes to print out names of objects and such. There are also some functions that have been declared with DEFINE rather than ROUTINE. Both the macros and the DEFINEd functions use the features of the greater MDL at will. What is interesting in particular is how it possibly reveals their setup: they had a full MDL interpreter running on their workstations, and ZIL is a subset that could be cross-compiled to a stripped-down target: the Z-machine. It looks like ROUTINE, OBJECT, ROOM and such are macros (in sources unknown) that would define standard MDL objects, possibly stored in some structure for findability. Then, the cross-compiler would be a program that takes these objects and writes out some Z-code. The workflow probably allowed (1) playing the games directly in the interpreter without compilation (2) making small changes to a running game and (3) recompiling the Z-code after having made those small changes, without needing to reload all the game's source code. Except for the cross-compilation step, this is the sort of environment the original Zork would have been written in, and I find it hard to imagine they would have accepted anything less.
- pinewurst 7y ago
  Except their “workstations” were the likes of VT100 terminals connected to their DEC-20.
mratzloff 7y ago
Very cool! Being an IF collector, I acquired the source code to Restaurant at the End of the Universe years ago. It's generous to call it unfinished—it's barely a game. I wasn't sure whether or not I could publish it, but it's great that this and much more are now available to everyone. I also have some internal Infocom emails and photos and things. Not sure if posting those would be welcome by the participants since most of them are still alive.
- RandomBacon 7y ago
  > Not sure if posting those would be welcome by the participants since most of them are still alive. Genuinely curious... is it okay to post private details of a person once they're dead? There are things that I want to keep private while I'm alive, and that I hope stay private when I'm dead. Does other people's curiousity trump my wishes just because I'm no longer around?
  - LanceH 7y ago
    Once you're dead, what someone says or writes about you doesn't even need to be true (in the US).
  - aidenn0 7y ago
    IANAL, but... In the US, it's reasonably well established that you have no privacy rights after death[1]. That doesn't necessarily make it safe to publish details about someone after they are dead though as property rights do exist through the estate of the deceased, so you may have to end up defending yourself from a defamation suit. In terms of it being "okay" there are unwritten rules about allowing some not-well-defined period of mourning before publishing private details, particularly ones that reflect poorly on the deceased. Publishing e.g. private correspondence of people from just 100 years ago seems completely non-controversial though. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-mortem_privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-mortem_privacy
- setpatchaddress 7y ago
  Short answer: we've already been down this path. https://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_sequel_to_hitchhikers_guide_to_the_galax/ https://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_seque... edit: if I had access to that data, I'd be interested in finding any hidden source files -- there's a copy of the source to a version of the ZAP assembler hiding in one of the minizork repos Jason Scott posted, for example. Might there be some others?
Tepix 7y ago
Wow, these are layers upon layers of archaic stuff. The article got me curiohs about Inform7 so i watched the introductory screencast on Vimeo https://vimeo.com/4221277 https://vimeo.com/4221277 . I‘m blown away! It appears to be easy to learn, feature rich and also well documented. Oh and it‘s also free! If you are interested in IF, go check it out.

What is ZIL anyway?

204 points by MrRadar 7y ago

bayesian_horse 7y ago

Maybe there can be a new golden age of interactive fiction using modern NLP and other AI related technologies?

jordanpg 7y ago
I enjoy thinking about the future of IF. I see it as a gaming/storytelling medium with a simultaneously huge potential but still vast chasms to cross before it gets there. NLP etc. has great potential to improve the parsing capabilities, to be sure, but it's not obvious to me that that will dramatically improve the experience. Is `pick up the shiny brass thing` really better than `GET LAMP`? IMO, it might make IF more accessible to non-techy, non-text parser gamers, but that's about it. I think the next leap for IF games will involve non-linear stories that are better suited to the medium. The success of games like "Papers, Please" in particular has sparked my imagination in this area.
- willvarfar 7y ago
  I recall a Ludum Dare entrant which was an android app that pretended to be a walkie-talkie to control some security operatives you were telling to search a building to investigate some noises. Very spooky. And a very good use of some basic voice parsing and NLP.
  - reificator 7y ago
    Link please? That is an incredibly ambitious concept for a game jam, but it sounds like they pulled it off?
    - klodolph 7y ago
      Game jams are literally the best time to try risky concepts. If it fails, you’ve spent only a small amount of time, and there’s a good chance that people will play your game and give you feedback. I can’t think of a better time to take a risk. (Note: Parent comment edited risky -> ambitious.)
      - reificator 7y ago
        I didn't mean it was a risk in any negative sense. I was just looking for the word "ambitious" and couldn't find it in my sleep deprived state... Seriously, I'm so tired I looked up "ballsy thesaurus" and clicked related words for probably five minutes before I gave up looking and just typed 'risky' hoping it'd be good enough.
    - willvarfar 7y ago
      Googling found it http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=8342 http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid... The gameplay video is awesome. But perhaps not so much NLP... this was 2012! Was it really that long ago? And my memory was fuzzy. But just imagine what could be possible!
- PaulHoule 7y ago
  Inform 7 lets you write games in a language that reads like English even if it doesn't write like English.
- alchemism 7y ago
  The most memorable IF I’ve played through was one[1] in which you were a captured spy being interrogated in semi-linear fashion. The game was a retelling of your capture, where every wrong choice amounted to ‘It could not have happened that way, go back and tell me what you really did.’ The only way to win was to slip one lie into the retelling, and then when the game catches up to the present moment... [1]Spider and Web
  - gjm11 7y ago
    Written by Andrew "Zarf" Plotkin, the person whose blog post about ZIL this is all a discussion of.
- Zanni 7y ago
  Struggling with the limitations of the parser was one of the recurring frustrations with Infocom games. "GET LAMP" is fine, but anything more complex quickly becomes challenging. I remember getting stuck in "The Lurking Horror" because I couldn't figure out how to climb down off a ledge, despite having a ladder. Use ladder? Climb ladder? Climb down? Climb down with ladder? Climb ledge with ladder?
  - Drdrdrq 7y ago
    So... What was it? :)
msla 7y ago
The problem to solve is game length and replayability. If you don't make moon logic puzzles, your puzzles can be solved relatively quickly unless you're very, very good at making fair puzzles which are also legitimately difficult. Therefore, you're going to need more puzzles than an FPS or action game which incidentally has some puzzles in order to achieve the same total game length, and making content like that is legitimately hard. Similarly, in order to make your games playable more than once, you need branching paths, such that you have different routes for the players to go down each time, and I really shouldn't need to explain the concept of "combinatorial explosion" in this forum. Add to that the expense of things like art assents and voice acting (unless you really think text adventures are going to come back in a big way) and it becomes prohibitively expensive to not railroad everyone down one main plot with, at most, a few minor side-treks which quickly rejoin the main line.
- PaulHoule 7y ago
  I want a procedurally generated version of Danganronpa.
- zantana 7y ago
  I do think there is a Sturgeon's Law problem where it's hard enough to come up with linear stories which are compelling. Based on some of the experimentalism in modern day game development in places like ichi.io hopefully they can come with some compelling genres I'm not going to go down some half finished path in Bandersnatch when Black Mirror has enough problem with single stories.
- jordanpg 7y ago
  This is why I think the "Papers, Please" paradigm is so interesting. The overall storyline is replaced with a repetitive but novel task with increasing difficultly, and various other loosely coupled storylines are grafted onto the task in different ways. The task also replaces the explicit puzzles. It is as though rather than being told the story, you are viewing vignettes of the story through a very narrow window
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  The reason why IF Games are so focused on puzzles is that they essential can't do anything else. Even dialogs are either about solving a puzzle or choosing a branch in the story. The point about AI in IF would be to break that mold. Dialogs can be more challenging, for example you could make a game about interrogating people. Or you could tell NPCs to do certain stuff for you. Or these NPCs could have some advanced planning or decision making. To make IF more interesting, especially for those outside a very narrow niche, you would need them to be a lot easier to navigate, and offer more challenges that don't look like puzzles and don't hit you with a brain-twister at every turn.
sehugg 7y ago
Versu was one such attempt, with an engine designed by the Sims 3 AI developer: https://versu.com/about/ https://versu.com/about/ Though I'd guess that's more of a sophisticated GOFAI than RNNs.
blacksmith_tb 7y ago
Seems like smart speakers are a good fit, my eight year old spent a little while playing with an IF Alexa skill not long ago. Of course, backtracking leads to a lot of agonizing repetition, which isn't really different than seeing it in text, but at least there you can skim over descriptions you've already seen.
- egypturnash 7y ago
  This is why "verbose/brief/superbrief" became a thing in IF. Verbose: Always show the full description of a room when you enter it. Brief: Show a short description when you re-enter a room. Superbrief: Always show the short description. (Regardless of which you chose, you could always 'look' to get a full description.)
imglorp 7y ago
I love this idea, but encourage people not to get hung up on the UI--ie how you interact with the game world--and instead think about what's going on in the game world. What if the world included a number of fully independent agents with their own motivations, values, and policies and equipped with pattern matching, goal solving, optimization, and even a hint of common sense[1]. The game state would never be the same twice, and it would depend on how you interacted with the agents and they with each other. TlDr: If you open a door, you might let the Grue out of its maze. [1] https://github.com/AndrewSmart/opencyc https://github.com/AndrewSmart/opencyc
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  I would suggest dialogs as the main focus for AI. I don't believe "complex and dynamic" NPCs would work well enough to make a fun game.
- egypturnash 7y ago
  I suspect that making it not feel like you're pushing buttons to get the same lines of dialogue out of wandering bots is going to require solving some pretty hard AI problems. You could probably make it work now with, say, a game world full of broken robots or something.
gmueckl 7y ago
Well, I would like to think that the ties of interactive fiction to text as the mode of interaction are likely the first to be broken. Both speech recognition and speech synthesis have progressed by leaps and bounds. Computer graphics have progressed to a point where human characters can be made expressive and nuanced. Imagine an engine that that takes games scripted as interactive fiction, procedurally generates the game world from the prose (far fetched, but first steps exist as research papers), populates it with the characters from the text and makes them act out the written dialog while honoring the implicit stage directions given in the written form ("he whispers in your ear" etc...). All of that presented in VR, which would make having a dialog with these virtual characters more natural. Looking at the tech that exists today, I believe that we are about halfway there.

mruts 7y ago

It seems like MDL uses both greater/less than and parens. Is this analogous to Scheme using both brackets and parens? That is, just for readability?

jerf 7y ago
It was the early 80s. Readability wouldn't be invented for about another 20 years or so. Actually kinda serious. You need to be able to spare the RAM to have the comments, whitespace, large variables, breaking things nicely into functions, etc. I've got modules I've documented where the documentation alone would fail to fit into, say, a Commodore 64's RAM, as plain text. Early 1980s "big iron" would still be considered on the high end of embedded programming today. (In the sense that a Raspberry Pi is embedded programming.)
- blattimwind 7y ago
  That's a really interesting perspective. If I think about it an application really doesn't need to be large or complex at all to accrue a couple hundred kB of source code, libraries not included.
- abecedarius 7y ago
  They developed these on a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10. It's not like they were editing/compiling on the C64. Of course targeting small systems does influence the coding style, but...
  - jerf 7y ago
    A top-end PDP, according to that page, could address ~8MB, though I'm sure they didn't have it for a while; other charts on the internet suggest a top-end PDP-10 would get up to 33 mega Hz. 8MB for an embedded controller is no great ask and you have to crawl a ways down the spec sheet pile to get a 33MHz processor nowadays. A top-end PDP-10 would today put it roughly on par with an Arduino [1], although the Arduino would be a bit short on RAM. Even if you have the space to spare on comments and long variable names, you've been raised in a culture that considers those insanely expensive extravagances. [1]: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Products/Compare https://www.arduino.cc/en/Products/Compare

lousken 7y ago

FYI the article is not about ZFS ZIL but Zork Implementation Language

chungy 7y ago
I too assumed this was going to be about the ZFS Intent Log.

Nanocurrency 7y ago

ZIL is also the gas of Zilliqa, a smart contract platform. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/zilliqa/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/zilliqa/

egypturnash 7y ago
I know all of these words except for “Zilliqua” but I do not understand this sentence.
- merlincorey 7y ago
  It appears to be some kind of ethereum-like-but-different cryptocurrency focused on smart contracts (as opposed to a general computer that can implement smart contraccts).
taradinoc 7y ago
Yes, it's a cruel twist of fate that all this news about Infocom's ZIL is happening shortly after the launch of a cryptocurrency called "ZIL", in the same month as a conference called "Infocom". Twitter search has been useless.

zzo38computer 7y ago

I have not programmed in ZIL or Inform, but have made implementations of Z-machine, as well as a "Tricky Document" describing various optimizations that can be used in a Z-machine code (such as Black-Johansen text packing, the SET->BCOM optimization, storing introduction text in the input buffer, etc).

taradinoc 7y ago
Do you like this?
- zzo38computer 7y ago
  I like Tricky Document; that is why I wrote it. (Or do you mean something else? If you mean ZIL, well, then I don't know a lot about that.)

linsomniac 7y ago

What does this have to do with the Zfs Intent Log?!? :-)

myself248 7y ago
That's what I thought I was coming here to read about. HN article titles are the worst.

kmill 7y ago

Looking through a bunch of code in the archive, it was interesting to come across the macro for TELL, which is used everywhere in games as a sort of printf, and it has some special printf-like codes to print out names of objects and such. There are also some functions that have been declared with DEFINE rather than ROUTINE. Both the macros and the DEFINEd functions use the features of the greater MDL at will. What is interesting in particular is how it possibly reveals their setup: they had a full MDL interpreter running on their workstations, and ZIL is a subset that could be cross-compiled to a stripped-down target: the Z-machine. It looks like ROUTINE, OBJECT, ROOM and such are macros (in sources unknown) that would define standard MDL objects, possibly stored in some structure for findability. Then, the cross-compiler would be a program that takes these objects and writes out some Z-code. The workflow probably allowed (1) playing the games directly in the interpreter without compilation (2) making small changes to a running game and (3) recompiling the Z-code after having made those small changes, without needing to reload all the game's source code. Except for the cross-compilation step, this is the sort of environment the original Zork would have been written in, and I find it hard to imagine they would have accepted anything less.

pinewurst 7y ago
Except their “workstations” were the likes of VT100 terminals connected to their DEC-20.

mratzloff 7y ago

Very cool! Being an IF collector, I acquired the source code to Restaurant at the End of the Universe years ago. It's generous to call it unfinished—it's barely a game. I wasn't sure whether or not I could publish it, but it's great that this and much more are now available to everyone. I also have some internal Infocom emails and photos and things. Not sure if posting those would be welcome by the participants since most of them are still alive.

RandomBacon 7y ago
> Not sure if posting those would be welcome by the participants since most of them are still alive. Genuinely curious... is it okay to post private details of a person once they're dead? There are things that I want to keep private while I'm alive, and that I hope stay private when I'm dead. Does other people's curiousity trump my wishes just because I'm no longer around?
- LanceH 7y ago
  Once you're dead, what someone says or writes about you doesn't even need to be true (in the US).
- aidenn0 7y ago
  IANAL, but... In the US, it's reasonably well established that you have no privacy rights after death[1]. That doesn't necessarily make it safe to publish details about someone after they are dead though as property rights do exist through the estate of the deceased, so you may have to end up defending yourself from a defamation suit. In terms of it being "okay" there are unwritten rules about allowing some not-well-defined period of mourning before publishing private details, particularly ones that reflect poorly on the deceased. Publishing e.g. private correspondence of people from just 100 years ago seems completely non-controversial though. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-mortem_privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-mortem_privacy
setpatchaddress 7y ago
Short answer: we've already been down this path. https://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_sequel_to_hitchhikers_guide_to_the_galax/ https://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_seque... edit: if I had access to that data, I'd be interested in finding any hidden source files -- there's a copy of the source to a version of the ZAP assembler hiding in one of the minizork repos Jason Scott posted, for example. Might there be some others?

Tepix 7y ago

Wow, these are layers upon layers of archaic stuff. The article got me curiohs about Inform7 so i watched the introductory screencast on Vimeo https://vimeo.com/4221277 https://vimeo.com/4221277 . I‘m blown away! It appears to be easy to learn, feature rich and also well documented. Oh and it‘s also free! If you are interested in IF, go check it out.