[HN Gopher] A treasury of Zork maps
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A treasury of Zork maps
Author : et-al
Score : 229 points
Date : 2023-02-08 14:56 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.zarfhome.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.zarfhome.com)
| billfruit wrote:
| While Zork and its relatives are interesting, are there any non-
| narrative based text games?
| anthk wrote:
| Puzzle 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.
| predictsoft wrote:
| Spiritwrak has a transcript/walkthrough
| https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/solutions/Spirit-
| Transcript...
| billfruit wrote:
| I was thinking more like open ended simulations.
|
| Perhaps in the vein of 'Footy Fanatic', a football management
| simulation, https://classicreload.com/footy-fanatic.html
| fulltimeloser wrote:
| The 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/
| [deleted]
| ascotan wrote:
| You 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).
| fulltimeloser wrote:
| I had several games back then that where "copies" from other
| people. But many of these games where unplayable because
| without the manual you had a really hard time to figure out
| what to do. It was common for complex games to have thick
| manuals and virtually no in game help or tutorials. And there
| where no internet to search for answers.
| busyant wrote:
| > You couldn't really play any games from the 80's without
| graph paper.
|
| In high school (~1985/86) a friend and his brothers mapped the
| Ultima IV world by commandeering the family ping pong table
| covering it with several sheets of graph paper.
|
| It was a glorious map.
| jghn wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Was 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 wrote:
| There 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.
| spacemadness wrote:
| One of my best gaming memories is mapping out the megadungeon
| that is Alternate Reality: The Dungeon played on my C64. I
| never beat it, but mapping out the dungeon stuck with me as an
| immersive experience.
|
| I love that the Etrian Odyssey games make mapping a
| centerpiece. I don't see modern gamers going for graph paper
| ever again but having a map maker included really helps
| experience a bygone era.
| sfink wrote:
| I recently went through my old box of papers in the garage,
| and man did those maps bring back memories! So many hours
| spent painfully mapping things out on graph paper. Alternate
| Reality: The City was probably one of the biggest mapping
| projects I did, but I had a thick pile from many different
| games. The Bard's Tale series was especially noteworthy.
|
| It's sad--if I were to attempt to play one of those today, I
| would give up immediately rather than deal with the insanely
| slow loading and glacially-paced gameplay. But at the time, I
| think the slowness contributed to the immersion. There was
| more than enough time to reflect and, well, map. It burned
| those experiences deep into my memory. Alternate Reality in
| particular was painfully, painfully slow on my computer,
| which was enormously frustrating at the time, and yet even
| though it was barely a game (you mostly wandered around
| exploring and getting annoyed at unimplemented buildings,
| with the occasional high-stakes combat) it is one of the more
| memorable experiences of my ill-spent youth.
| spacemadness wrote:
| The longish loading time for an encounter really did
| something interesting for immersion. It's a little similar
| to a DM rolling dice to generate an encounter--that built
| in anticipation isn't really possible in modern games
| without annoying gamers.
| Narishma wrote:
| Zork's (and text adventure games in general) maps aren't grid-
| based, so you don't need graph paper.
| jghn wrote:
| No, but I'd imagine a lot of people were like myself. I
| already had a ton of graph paper and was used to using that
| to draw maps for D&D and more grid based games.
| chongli wrote:
| Yeah in fact if you try to use graph paper to map out the
| areas in Zork you'll get immensely frustrated at its non-
| Euclidean geometry. The game designers seemed to be quite
| fond of having your character change compass directions
| between locations, so heading south and then immediately
| north will often leave you in a different location than you
| started!
|
| The better way to map Zork is to treat it like a non-planar
| graph and use graph paper to build an adjacency matrix [1].
| Since Z-machine is a bytecode VM that often ran on 8-bit
| computers it's a pretty safe assumption that the game likely
| has 256 or fewer vertices in the graph. So if you give every
| area you visit a 2-digit hex ID you can make the matrix small
| enough to be manageable.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjacency_matrix
| tomcam wrote:
| A reminder to younger readers that these complex maps emerge from
| programs that ran in 64K, smaller than most web page logos.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| Also, 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.
| Bluecobra wrote:
| It's really amazing how they pulled off Zork for micros. I
| think it took up ~1MB of memory on a PDP-10?
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I know it was a cross platform virtual machine, but Did it
| actually interpret byte code and not just text?
| chongli wrote:
| Yes. 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 wrote:
| The are new games made for the zmachine since the 90s.
| Narishma wrote:
| 32K I think for the first game. The TRS-80 and Apple II
| versions at least.
| larsbrinkhoff wrote:
| Some of those maps show the original Zork that ran in 256K of
| 36-bit words.
| msla wrote:
| Previously:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34749477
| fbdab103 wrote:
| For 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_Undergr...
|
| Zork 2: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Zork_II_-
| _The_Wizard_of_Fr...
| anthk wrote:
| Parchement with the game from IFDB would be far better.
| waltbosz wrote:
| Does 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?
| qup wrote:
| I 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.
| raldi wrote:
| Not just play it, but even to serve as Dungeon Master. There
| have been a bunch of HN submissions about it.
| DrSiemer wrote:
| ZZT 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| FROSTVANS wrote:
| [flagged]
| ggm wrote:
| Although 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.
| smusamashah wrote:
| These also belong to reddit.com/r/wimmelbilder
| UberFly wrote:
| These 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.
| dundercoder wrote:
| The 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.
| anthk wrote:
| Get Dungeon instead of Zork I-II-III, it's closer to the original
| concept.
|
| https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=4gxk83ja4twckm6j
| larsbrinkhoff wrote:
| Get Zork instead of Dungeon. It's closer... it _is_ the
| original concept.
| anthk wrote:
| Well, I can't argue with you. He He...
|
| I mean... MIT Zork.
| bink wrote:
| So, what does a grue look like?
| iainmerrick wrote:
| Turns the lights off and you'll see.
| II2II wrote:
| That 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 wrote:
| This comment section really needs a spoiler tag!
| low_tech_love wrote:
| You can see and also interact with some of them in
| Sorcerer! (The sequel to Enchanter)
| predictsoft wrote:
| I once hacked Zork so you can see what the thief is doing
| (swapped player character for thief) as if you were playing.
| raldi wrote:
| If 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_we...
| Chant-I-CRW wrote:
| I enjoyed your write-up, but what about the thief logic?
| keyneus wrote:
| If 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/
|
| 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).
| Infocom's own internal documentation for ZIL is here: https:/
| /archive.org/details/Learning_ZIL_Steven_Eric_Meretzk....
| kramerger wrote:
| Ah for Gods sake!
|
| > "Unreviewed Content"
|
| > View in the Reddit app to continue.
|
| Nah, I'm good.
| m463 wrote:
| https://teddit.net/r/raldi/comments/10dtch/i_spent_my_weeken.
| ..
| [deleted]
| spacemadness wrote:
| Everyday I am thankful I am not an engineer working with a
| product owner that pushes these annoying design patterns.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Absolutely. One of those things that many of us take for
| granted, but shouldn't.
| raldi wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| On mobile I use i.reddit.com which is the mobile web
| equivalent to old.reddit.com
| andrepd wrote:
| I'm constantly amazed at how i.reddit.com still works.
| I've been using it for at least 12 years.
| marvin wrote:
| A lot of people will leave reddit forever when they take
| old and i down. Unsure if someone has understood this,
| but I suspect so.
| Bluecobra wrote:
| I 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)
| bailoon wrote:
| I 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.
| Maursault wrote:
| Reddit'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.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| You can tell Safari to load the desktop version instead.
| Unfortunately of course Javascript and the DOM allow
| sites to know whether you're using a mobile device
| anyway, by looking at the screen size. So that doesn't
| always work.
|
| But to blame those antipatterns on Steve Jobs makes no
| sense.
| consumer451 wrote:
| sh.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_wee...
| TEP_Kim_Il_Sung wrote:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/raldi/comments/10dtch/i_spent_my_we.
| ..
|
| Loads fine.
| roboben wrote:
| Where 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 wrote:
| One place is
| https://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/5zyoqrsugeopel3ffhz_...
| moffkalast wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Edit Dungeon/Zorks' Z-machine source code (zdungeon) to
| define new verbs.
|
| http://www.penguincentral.com/retrocomputing/zdungeon/
|
| Inform6+Inform6 lib:
|
| http://jxself.org/git/inform
| http://jxself.org/git/informlib
|
| Inform's Begginer's Guide:
|
| https://rinform.org/docs/IBG.pdf
|
| The advanced one, for advanced Inform programmers:
|
| 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
| moffkalast wrote:
| You'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?
| anthk wrote:
| Inform6 it's very powerful. You define the actions
| objects, and it does it very well by default. Objects
| have atributes (openable, stackable, decoration...lots of
| them) and you can even set the library messages on these
| actions after being done (or before).
| egypturnash wrote:
| _Zork_ was originally written in 1977 on a PDP-10, which
| had a ceiling of about one megabyte of memory; it was
| ported to microcomputers in three parts from 1980-1982,
| and had to fit into about 48k of RAM and 85-170k of disc
| space.
|
| It is approximately forty-five years old. The curve has
| long since moved on.
| ncr100 wrote:
| For a moment I hoped you were offering these prompts on HN,
| and would run a game of Zork via a comment thread.
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