[HN Gopher] Dungeons and Directories, an exploration game in you...
___________________________________________________________________
Dungeons and Directories, an exploration game in your file explorer
Author : mistermatt
Score : 102 points
Date : 2023-12-12 16:08 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (wheybags.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (wheybags.com)
| CppPro wrote:
| This is very cool.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I remember when I was 6 and my dad brought home an Osbourne for
| me to play with. Just using CPM felt like dungeon diving to this
| weird world where you might find a loot in the form of a game or
| something.
| krumpet wrote:
| I completely agree with this comment. I could have spent all
| day on my C64 without even having a game to play or knowing how
| to code beyond PRINT and GOTO. Hacking around on a computer
| back in the 80s made me feel like I was part of a secret club
| and that, at any moment, I was going to live out War Games or
| some such (especially once we had a modem). The possibilities
| seemed limitless!
| supportengineer wrote:
| As a young teen, I joined a local Commodore users group and at
| the meetings you could buy the latest monthly floppy disk for a
| small fee, and you never knew what you would find on it.
| gopher_space wrote:
| My first introduction to The Command Line was playing MUDs on a
| IIgs and I've never stopped thinking about it in terms of
| exploration.
| ikari_pl wrote:
| yes yes yes!
|
| I tried to convey some of that magic, or at least logically
| reason why those 8-bits were awesome, in a blog post once -
| https://retrofun.pl/2021/05/18/hobbyarding/ :)
|
| It still feels like this sometimes. Finding poorly documented
| system calls, changing screen properties in ways beyond BASIC,
| getting into how CP/M works internally... (more comprehensible
| than today's 1000x larger systems)... Or even doing Advent of
| Code in BASIC is cool!
| krumpet wrote:
| I tried conveying the same to my teen children. It went over
| like a lead zeppelin.
| ikari_pl wrote:
| so it IS only in our heads?
|
| on the other hand, nobody would read a manual these days
| anymore...
| sudobash1 wrote:
| When I got my first PC (a Linux Eee PC netbook), I remember
| opening an xterm and typing each letter of the alphabet, one at
| a time and hitting TAB-TAB to see all the commands that start
| with that letter. Not an efficient way to learn how to use
| bash, but it was exciting.
|
| The biggest hurdle for me was figuring out "how do I open a
| file?" I could cd around and ls, but what if I wanted to open a
| .doc in openoffice? There was no "double-click" for the command
| line.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Ah... I think I vaguely remember a similar older program that
| would (optionally, of course!) as a funny option delete the files
| when you "defeated" them.
| pimlottc wrote:
| You might be thinking of this Doom mod that create monsters for
| each system process and would kill an actual process every time
| you killed one:
|
| https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think by brain has combined this program and the inner
| space program that the sibling comment mentioned.
| butz wrote:
| Haven't looked it up in detail yet, but I am wondering if
| game process is a boss or player entity?
| Eiriksmal wrote:
| Or Operation: Inner Space. It used the file system to generate
| sectors to visit to clear viruses from your EXEs, and
| collecting non-contaminated EXEs to use as currency.
|
| It works great with Windows' backwards compatibility, but
| modern filesystems have so many thousands of directories the
| game is now impossible to complete.
|
| http://www.sdispace.com/
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think I probably combined these programs in my head.
| strictnein wrote:
| Thanks! Really enjoyed this game, but couldn't remember the
| name.
| mastersummoner wrote:
| Went looking for this comment. Loved this game as a kid.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Strange they used shortcuts on Windows, as Windows has had links
| since Vista:
|
| https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2016/12/02/symlin...
|
| Either this is because it's not at all well known, or because
| they think some users will be on XP. (Which would be strange)
| skrebbel wrote:
| Maybe it was easier? Iirc at least in some recent ish Windows
| versions, by default you needed admin privileges to run mklink.
| Given that a shortcut is just a regular file, that solves a lot
| of problems.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| That depends on your version of windows (newer versions are
| more relaxed on it). Also file links are 'weird' in windows.
|
| You have 3 types junction points, file links and directory
| links. Each one acting in its very weird odd way. Junction
| points are for local only directories. Files for files and
| directories can be either local dirs or remote SMB points.
| Junctions vs dir can be an interesting trade off on what you
| want it to do. With junciton being faster for many operations
| but local only. Also if the file is less than ~500 bytes
| there is no real gain as you will probably just consume MFT
| anyway either way.
| wheybags wrote:
| The problem is the max path size. There was a similar problem
| on Linux, where you have a max number of symlinks you can
| follow before the system gives up. Macos works because finder
| resolves symlinks and opens the target directly.
| prophesi wrote:
| > In the end, the current version of the game create 41,514
| directories, 15,2041 files (mostly empty files with messages in
| their names), and 45,399 links, which makes it rather unplayable
| for those unfortunate enough to try running it on a mechanical
| hard drive.
|
| https://github.com/wheybags/DungeonsAndDirectories/blob/mast...
|
| Be warned if you're not using an SSD!
| antx wrote:
| Well, that seems like the ideal candidate for a RAM drive,
| doesn't it?
| thot_experiment wrote:
| Ramdisks are extremely slept on, there is a lot of stuff you
| can kludge with a ramdisk in a pinch. I had to do some video
| stream processing the other day and I didn't have time. So I
| just made a ramdisk and read/wrote jpegs at 30fps, yeah it's
| stupid as hell, but it worked when I needed it to and that's
| what matters.
| _0ffh wrote:
| I have various folders mapped to RAM, like e.g. /var/tmp.
|
| This has many uses, as you said. E.g. sometimes even just
| downloading a video stream to disc creates a temporary file
| in the destination folder for every fragment. I just d/l
| those into /var/tmp first and then mv the finished video to
| where it's supposed to live. I'm sure both my SSD and HDD
| are grateful! =)
| anthk wrote:
| /dev/shm
| neilv wrote:
| I once did something based on the same principle, for a (very-
| very light) security solution, atop a simple closed-source media
| appliance that could play from USB Storage.
|
| I made a script on Linux to create a huge directory tree
| representing every possible sequence of a password of length N.
| Only one password path through the tree got the viewer to the
| directory that had the non-kid-safe media files.
|
| The non-security caveat of this was that the appliance seemed to
| scan the entire filesystem upon mount, which took a long time.
| (Even though it provided no UI, other than clicking to open
| directories and media files within them. Maybe the reason for the
| scan was to report to the mothership what content each user had,
| though, in this case, I had networking permanently disabled.) At
| least the huge tree didn't overflow any limit that prevented the
| appliance from working after an initial delay.
| wwweston wrote:
| Love this, but seems to me that if most directories didn't have
| files, you could `find` your way through...
| neilv wrote:
| The "very-very light" part is that it was easily defeated if
| you removed the USB Storage from the dumb appliance, and
| plugged it into almost anything else.
|
| If you had only the dumb appliance UI, however, finding the
| files would be a bigger chore than even energetic kids could
| accomplish in mere hours, and only if they knew it was there
| (the "password UI" was also hidden a little).
| landryraccoon wrote:
| Interesting. You'd need about a billion files to store all
| possible 6 character file names assuming you limited yourself
| to latin alphanumeric characters. How big are these USB drives?
| geek_at wrote:
| Many years ago I wrote a tamagochi like virtual pet called
| "Virus" which lived as "name.virus" file in a folder and you
| could feed it text files with a ".food" extension. Based on its
| DNA (random strings inside the".virus"file) it liked certain
| words more or less and had to eat quite a few files when it was
| Hungry
|
| It also left ".poop" files in the folder you had to clean up in
| order for it to stay healthy. Also added mating and offsprings
| which would fork the process so each would "live" their own life
| hashbazz wrote:
| Interesting idea. Horrible copy. I didn't get much past the first
| room, where my "eyes perked up" at seeing something shiny. A text
| adventure, among other things, has to be written well.
| sndwnm wrote:
| https://github.com/ChrisRx/dungeonfs Here's a pretty cool take
| using Linux
| abledon wrote:
| the thing should run out a VB6 script embedded in a .xlsx
| spreadsheet...
|
| Then you could have a portable game to bring into any enterprise
| office environment
| bluetwo wrote:
| Minor point: Creativity doesn't need a lot of tech.
| skogweb wrote:
| Is there an easy way to remove all the generated files?
| nomercy400 wrote:
| Creating these folder crawling games was great, until you get to
| the end, and the folder paths become too large and files and
| folders start disappearing.. and you learn about windows folder
| limits. Ah, fun times..
|
| Btw, that was 20 years ago.
| cozzyd wrote:
| should use FUSE!
| butz wrote:
| There was a game "Virus: The Game" (1997) on PC which takes place
| in your file system.
| kimixa wrote:
| There was also Inner Space (1992) [0] - possibly a similar
| idea, where levels are directories on your computer, and the
| goal to collect the "icons" (normally executables IIRC) inside.
|
| I remember having it on some demo disk as a kid
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation:_Inner_Space
| stalfosknight wrote:
| Minor nitpick: Why are people still insisting on calling macOS
| "OSX"? It hasn't been "Mac OS X" for quite some time now.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-12-13 23:00 UTC)