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A treasury of Zork maps
- ggm 4y agoAlthough otherwise quite visual I did my zork map as a 12 column table. 1 row number, Next 8 -the 4 cardinal points with the 4 major intersects, Up, Down, Notes With each cell except notes another row number. The different states of the rooms depending on button presses at flood control dam #3 and the like, made it like a periodic table with the radionucleotide subsequence.
- UberFly 4y agoThese maps are so amazing. I can see some of these on the wall framed. Zork and Hitchhikers Guide were my first games on my father's IBM PC. I got in trouble for being "addicted". Little has changed.
- raldi 4y agoIf you liked that, you might also like a deep dive I once did on the internals of the Zork maps: https://www.reddit.com/r/raldi/comments/10dtch/i_spent_my_weekend_hacking_zork/ https://www.reddit.com/r/raldi/comments/10dtch/i_spent_my_we...
- kramerger 4y agoAh for Gods sake! > "Unreviewed Content" > View in the Reddit app to continue. Nah, I'm good.
- raldi 4y agoI've never seen that before, but I'm configured to use the old UI. You can switch to it by changing "www" to "old" in the URL.
- thanatos519 4y agoOn mobile I use i.reddit.com which is the mobile web equivalent to old.reddit.com
- andrepd 4y agoI'm constantly amazed at how i.reddit.com still works. I've been using it for at least 12 years.
- marvin 4y agoA lot of people will leave reddit forever when they take old and i down. Unsure if someone has understood this, but I suspect so.
- bailoon 4y agoI doubt it will be a lot of people since most redditors use the app. But the few will cause a mighty ruckus and rage, rage against the dying of the "old". Reddit probably keeps old around because they don't want to deal with the incessant whining. God I would hate to run a social media platform.
- Bluecobra 4y agoI will be one of them. I stopped using Digg and switched to Reddit when they redesigned their website. At least we will still have HN to be bastion of simple design. (I hope)
- consumer451 4y agosh.reddit.com also works nicely on mobile, but you cannot sign-in. For me, it has less bugs than i., which will not load many images and also screws up pagination pretty often. example: https://sh.reddit.com/r/raldi/comments/10dtch/i_spent_my_weekend_hacking_zork/ https://sh.reddit.com/r/raldi/comments/10dtch/i_spent_my_wee...
- Maursault 4y agoReddit's conventional mobile interface is, much like imgur's, entirely unusable, yet it also stands out as astoundingly annoying. The mobile web is the only glaring mistake that Steve Jobs made in allowing web developers to irrevocably force an interface based on browser detection rather than leaving the viewing choice to the end user. But it's really controlling and OCD web developers on a per site basis that are to blame.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y agohttps://old.reddit.com/r/raldi/comments/10dtch/i_spent_my_weekend_hacking_zork/ https://old.reddit.com/r/raldi/comments/10dtch/i_spent_my_we... Loads fine.
- spacemadness 4y agoEveryday I am thankful I am not an engineer working with a product owner that pushes these annoying design patterns.
- CamperBob2 4y agoAbsolutely. One of those things that many of us take for granted, but shouldn't.
- m463 4y agohttps://teddit.net/r/raldi/comments/10dtch/i_spent_my_weekend_hacking_zork/ https://teddit.net/r/raldi/comments/10dtch/i_spent_my_weeken...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Chant-I-CRW 4y agoI enjoyed your write-up, but what about the thief logic?
- keyneus 4y agoIf you're at all interested in digging through the Zork code yourself, you no longer need to know Z-machine assembly: the source code for most Infocom games was released/leaked a few years back, and is available here: https://github.com/historicalsource/ https://github.com/historicalsource/ It's written in ZIL, which has a somewhat Lispy feel (for a bit of background, see another post by Plotkin here: http://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/what-is-zil-anyway.html http://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/what-is-zil-anyway.html). Infocom's own internal documentation for ZIL is here: https://archive.org/details/Learning_ZIL_Steven_Eric_Meretzky_1995 https://archive.org/details/Learning_ZIL_Steven_Eric_Meretzk....
- raldi 4y agoThanks, looks like this is the relevant code: https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1/blob/master/1actions.zil#L3919-L3927 https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1/blob/master/1actio... As I understand it, the thief doesn’t travel via room exits, but rather warps through the rooms sequentially in the order they’re listed in the code, skipping any that are sacred or non-land.
- tomcam 4y agoA reminder to younger readers that these complex maps emerge from programs that ran in 64K, smaller than most web page logos.
- larsbrinkhoff 4y agoSome of those maps show the original Zork that ran in 256K of 36-bit words.
- Narishma 4y ago32K I think for the first game. The TRS-80 and Apple II versions at least.
- flyinghamster 4y agoAlso, the Z-machine that ran Zork and other Infocom games was an early example of a cross-platform bytecode interpreter, well before Java and the like.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoI know it was a cross platform virtual machine, but Did it actually interpret byte code and not just text?
- chongli 4y agoYes. Z-machine specifies a table of 256 opcodes. Developers write code in ZIL (Z-machine Implementation Language), a text-based source code. The ZIL is then compiled into a byte code program consisting of those 1-byte opcodes as well as arguments and static data.
- anthk 4y agoThe are new games made for the zmachine since the 90s.
- Bluecobra 4y agoIt’s really amazing how they pulled off Zork for micros. I think it took up ~1MB of memory on a PDP-10?
- bink 4y agoSo, what does a grue look like?
- iainmerrick 4y agoTurns the lights off and you’ll see.
- II2II 4y agoThat will only let you see the insides of a grue, and I really don't have the patience to solve a maze puzzle to escape the intestines of a grue to tell everyone what they look like.
- nick123567 4y agoThis comment section really needs a spoiler tag!
- low_tech_love 4y agoYou can see and also interact with some of them in Sorcerer! (The sequel to Enchanter)
- roboben 4y agoWhere can I play this game? It’s probably available online in-browser? Also would love to see what ChatGPT would output if asked to describe a map or give instructions to draw.
- markx2 4y agoOne place is https://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/5zyoqrsugeopel3ffhz_vq/zork https://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/5zyoqrsugeopel3ffhz_...
- moffkalast 4y ago> There is a small mailbox here. > A rubber mat saying 'Welcome to Zork!' lies by the door. > check mailbox > That's not a verb I recognise. Ok yeah this thing could use some more NLP support.
- anthk 4y agoEdit Dungeon/Zorks' Z-machine source code (zdungeon) to define new verbs. http://www.penguincentral.com/retrocomputing/zdungeon/ http://www.penguincentral.com/retrocomputing/zdungeon/ Inform6+Inform6 lib: http://jxself.org/git/inform http://jxself.org/git/inform http://jxself.org/git/informlib http://jxself.org/git/informlib Inform's Begginer's Guide: https://rinform.org/docs/IBG.pdf https://rinform.org/docs/IBG.pdf The advanced one, for advanced Inform programmers: https://inform-fiction.org/manual/DM4.pdf https://inform-fiction.org/manual/DM4.pdf EDIT: I found no source for the ZDungeon port of it, but you can get the C version: https://github.com/devshane/zork https://github.com/devshane/zork
- moffkalast 4y agoYou'll likely always be behind the curve with that kind of basic approach I think, wouldn't it make more sense to retrain a transformer to map all possible inputs to the few possible actions?
- 4y ago
- dundercoder 4y agoThe Zork Chronicles is a fantastic novel based on the game. It’s hysterical! I hear the publisher is going to release an audio book soon.
- FROSTVANS 4y ago[flagged]
- anthk 4y agoGet Dungeon instead of Zork I-II-III, it's closer to the original concept. https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=4gxk83ja4twckm6j https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=4gxk83ja4twckm6j
- larsbrinkhoff 4y agoGet Zork instead of Dungeon. It's closer... it is the original concept.
- anthk 4y agoWell, I can't argue with you. He He... I mean... MIT Zork.
- ascotan 4y agoYou couldn't really play any games from the 80's without graph paper. To get anywhere beyond the house in Zork you needed to map out where all the paths in the game were. Same thing for Bard's Tale II (one of my favs). Generations of kids sat in front of their old Commodores making maps (and I guess some of us with art talents made them better).
- jghn 4y agoI remember the Wizardry series was especially punishing in this regard. It would have constructs like hidden teleporters, and in sone cases your “view” looked the same on the other side so it’d be unclear you weren’t where you thought you were
- qup 4y agoWas one of these on NES? With maybe six characters you could swap between who had different talents (like different jump heights)? Game was impossible.
- jghn 4y agoThere was an NES port but it was watered down a bit IIRC. Wizardry I was a pretty standard D&D style dungeon crawl game. 6 chars, your basic classes (fighter, thief, cleric, mage) with a few prestige classes. Wander around the dungeon and occasionally, well, frequently, run into groups of monsters. A few dynamics I remember being particularly pains in the ass: 1) You could not save while in the dungeon, and if you wiped your party was stuck there, dead. You could go rescue them by going to that space and picking them up *BUT* that meant you had to go down there with fewer than 6 people in your party & thus underpowered and you couldn't mix good & evil alignments in a party. So in the early game it was often easier to just reroll new chars, and at the end of the game it could be almost impossible to go fetch them 2) Your characters aged over time, and stats started getting worse. So in a sense you're on a timer. Wizardry II & III were more of the same IIRC. Wizardry IV was notorious for being the most difficult game ever made at the time. I pointed one of my hardcore gamer coworkers at Wiz IV not too long ago, he's the sort of person that defeats every new game in a microsecond. He gave up after a day and said he couldn't take it. The ones after that became more like standard CRPGs people might recognize in the 90s + beyond.
- billfruit 4y agoWhile Zork and its relatives are interesting, are there any non-narrative based text games?
- anthk 4y agoPuzzle based? - Anchorhead it's Stephen King/Lovecraft like. - All Thing Devours it's a time travelling puzzle. - Spiritwrak it's s Zorkian free as in freedom adventure, were guessing what does the spell do to the world it's part of the puzzle and story.
- billfruit 4y agoI was thinking more like open ended simulations. Perhaps in the vein of 'Footy Fanatic', a football management simulation, https://classicreload.com/footy-fanatic.html https://classicreload.com/footy-fanatic.html
- fulltimeloser 4y agoThe Kingdom of Loathing [1] is fun. It's not a pure text adventure, it has a GUI and there is hand drawn art. [1] https://www.kingdomofloathing.com/ https://www.kingdomofloathing.com/
- predictsoft 4y agoSpiritwrak has a transcript/walkthrough https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/solutions/Spirit-Transcript.doc https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/solutions/Spirit-Transcript...
- anthk 4y agoI avoid these. Also, you could always get the source code, as the game it's free as in freedom.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- waltbosz 4y agoDoes anyone remember the shareware game ZZT? If you bought the full version, it came with printed maps. I still have mine somewhere. Also, has anyone tried to get ChatGPT/etc to play Zork?
- raldi 4y agoNot just play it, but even to serve as Dungeon Master. There have been a bunch of HN submissions about it.
- DrSiemer 4y agoZZT was created by Tim Sweeney, CEO and founder of Epic Games. It was a huge contribution to my deeper understanding of programming at the time.
- waltbosz 4y agoI remember being so frustrated by the ZZT programming language because it lacked so many fundamental features. IIRC, you couldn't even sum variables. But it didn't stop me from spending hours and hours creating ZZT games. At times it was fun to try to figure out how to do things. I once wrote a music sequencer.
- qup 4y agoI have had chatGPT simulate an adventure game, the first day or two it came out. It was very good at generating a story, and pretty bad at working the mechanics of a game. Inventory didn't work reliably, predictable stuff like that.
- fbdab103 4y agoFor all looking to play Zork, the Internet Archive has you covered and you can launch it from your browser seemingly inside DosBox within the browser. Zork 1: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Zork_I_-_The_Great_Underground_Empire_1980 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Zork_I_-_The_Great_Undergr... Zork 2: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Zork_II_-_The_Wizard_of_Frobozz_1981 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Zork_II_-_The_Wizard_of_Fr...
- anthk 4y agoParchement with the game from IFDB would be far better.
- predictsoft 4y agoI once hacked Zork so you can see what the thief is doing (swapped player character for thief) as if you were playing.
- msla 4y agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34749477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34749477
- smusamashah 4y agoThese also belong to reddit.com/r/wimmelbilder