The Visible Zorker: Zork 1

(eblong.com)

70 points | by PLenz 4 hours ago

3 comments

  • raffael_de 26 minutes ago
    Would Inform 6 nowadays be still the language of choice for developing text based games like Zork? Or even a reasonable choice for that matter?
    • svachalek 19 minutes ago
      It's still pretty good. TADS is a more modern alternative, and the one I would go with, but basically these haven't been commercially viable products since the 80s so there's not a lot going into it.

      Arguably, the right answer now is to document everything that matters to you about the adventure, and tell an LLM to run it.

    • anthk 4 minutes ago
      Yes, very easy to grasp and games will be much lighter than Inform7. Tads it's propietary even if the interpreters are free. Inform6 has the whole stack (even free documentation too), from Inform Beginner's Guide to these, where you have libre games for Inform6 and some free as in freedom related documentation of Inform6 internals.

      https://jxself.org/git/

    • dwheeler 14 minutes ago
      I think Inform 7 is pretty cool. I suggest checking in to that as well.
  • Joe_Cool 2 hours ago
    This is neat. Z-machine internals without needing to run a debugger.
    • ghaff 2 hours ago
      Very cool. Did a very little testing for Infocom back in the day and knew a lot of the folks involved.
  • projektfu 1 hour ago
    It seems to often make it hard to get back where you were, like you go west and then east and end up in a different place. I don't know enough about z-machines to tell why.
    • anthk 2 minutes ago
      Not ZMachine related, not even with Inform6, where n_to, s_to and w_to e_to are pretty much self-explanatory. It's just that Dungeon/Zork/Zork-I-II-III were made that way.
    • pdw 19 minutes ago
      Nothing to do with the VM. The game was designed that way, navigation is part of the puzzle.
    • conexions 1 hour ago
      Perhaps you could try making a map.
      • sllabres 43 minutes ago
        Or in this case; just click on "map"