- The Scheme engine that this implements is really small -- about 10k of heap. (This is a Z-code game, and the Z-machine is a 16-bit architecture.) And the garbage collection sucks. So you can't do much with this beyond toy problems.
- You could port it to the Glulx VM (32-bit architecture) without too much trouble, and then you'd have a couple of gigabytes. Feel free. :)
- As an IF author, I never intend players to guess a verb. But I do expect players to be familiar with the common IF verbs -- the stuff on the PDF sheet, basically. This was more true in 1996, when the IF community was tiny and all read the same Usenet group. I wrote this thing for enthusiasts.
- Today, I'd put more emphasis in the help docs on the difference between the two input modes (">" and ">>"). And I'd check if the player typed a line starting with ">" -- display an appropriate explanation of why that's wrong.
- But I'm not going to update this thing, because yes, 1996 was a long time ago.
- The era of the text adventure is dead the way the era of home-brewed beer is dead. Nobody makes it and nobody drinks it, except the people who still do.
- Is it silly to write a text adventure in 2014? I put one up for sale a couple of months ago (hadeanlands.com) and it's doing pretty well. Yes, for actual money. No, it's not a gigantic indie success, but the niche still exists and there are still fans. So that's my past twenty years of work justified.
Some notes:
- Source code: http://eblong.com/zarf/ftp/lists.tar.Z
- The Scheme engine that this implements is really small -- about 10k of heap. (This is a Z-code game, and the Z-machine is a 16-bit architecture.) And the garbage collection sucks. So you can't do much with this beyond toy problems.
- You could port it to the Glulx VM (32-bit architecture) without too much trouble, and then you'd have a couple of gigabytes. Feel free. :)
- As an IF author, I never intend players to guess a verb. But I do expect players to be familiar with the common IF verbs -- the stuff on the PDF sheet, basically. This was more true in 1996, when the IF community was tiny and all read the same Usenet group. I wrote this thing for enthusiasts.
- Today, I'd put more emphasis in the help docs on the difference between the two input modes (">" and ">>"). And I'd check if the player typed a line starting with ">" -- display an appropriate explanation of why that's wrong.
- But I'm not going to update this thing, because yes, 1996 was a long time ago.
- The era of the text adventure is dead the way the era of home-brewed beer is dead. Nobody makes it and nobody drinks it, except the people who still do.
- Is it silly to write a text adventure in 2014? I put one up for sale a couple of months ago (hadeanlands.com) and it's doing pretty well. Yes, for actual money. No, it's not a gigantic indie success, but the niche still exists and there are still fans. So that's my past twenty years of work justified.