Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
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From: pds@lemming.webo.dg.com (Paul D. Smith)
Subject: Re: Walkthroughs
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Message-ID: <PDS.92Dec10133234@lemming.webo.dg.com>
In-Reply-To: johnf@apollo.hp.com's message of Wed, 9 Dec 1992 17:19:31 GMT
Date: 10 Dec 92 18:32:34 GMT
To: johnf@apollo.hp.com (John Francis)
Lines: 46
References: <BywuH8.BoD@acsu.buffalo.edu> <PDS.92Dec8105706@lemming.webo.dg.com>
	<1g3hg5INNqdh@life.ai.mit.edu> <Bz05GK.Ct7@apollo.hp.com>
Organization: NSDD/ONSD, Data General Corp., Westboro, MA
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[] Regarding Re: Walkthroughs;
[] johnf@apollo.hp.com (John Francis) writes:

    jf> In article <1g3hg5INNqdh@life.ai.mit.edu> dmb@case.ai.mit.edu
    jf> (David Baggett) writes:

    jf> My favourite "walkthroughs" consisted of a transcript of a
    jf> game session.  (similar to the the output from a "SCRIPT"
    jf> command in Infocom games).

Just a note: I suspect that making freely available complete
transcripts for games covered under some kind of copyright would be a
violation of the copyright--I mean, you've basically provided the
whole game right there!

    jf> [... discussion of OBEY command ...]

Infocom had a similar feature in the debugging versions of their
games; you could start to record a "command script file" (that's what
I call it) with the command #reco.  It would basically write out each
command to a disk file.  You ended the recording with #unre.

You could then cause the game to "run" a command script file with the
command #comm: it would read and execute each command in the script
file as if the user had typed it in.

In fact, you can still see the commands #comm, #reco, and #unre in
the word lists for some of the Infocom games--although if you try to
use them the program will probably fault :(

I implemented this feature in my pinfocom interpreter (v. 3.1, to be
out soon: it's not in 3.0), and I use it to test the interpreter by
creating complete or partial scripts for a bunch of games and
generating a transcript output, then testing each new version by
re-running the script and comparing to the old output.  Works quite
well :)
--

                                                                paul
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