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From: johnf@apollo.hp.com (John Francis)
Subject: Re: Walkthroughs
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Date: Wed, 9 Dec 1992 17:19:31 GMT
References: <BywuH8.BoD@acsu.buffalo.edu> <PDS.92Dec8105706@lemming.webo.dg.com> <1g3hg5INNqdh@life.ai.mit.edu>
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In article <1g3hg5INNqdh@life.ai.mit.edu> dmb@case.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett) writes:
>In article <PDS.92Dec8105706@lemming.webo.dg.com> pds@lemming.webo.dg.com (Paul D. Smith) writes:
>>While that may be true, I personally find the "extraneous text"
>>walkthroughs extremely annoying for those of use *with* the game
>>(although I admit I've never used a walkthrough :).
>
>As I mentioned to Paul in email, I personally like both kinds.  Paul's
>favorite seems to have been given the type name "stepsolution," while
>the prose kind are just "game.txt"  Let's just follow this convention
>and have both on ftp.gmd.de.

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

In fact, in the proto-game-play-system I wrote about fifteen years ago
(on a DECSystem-20) I took this one stage further, as follows:
The transcript was a verbatim log of everything that appeared on the
terminal. In particular, the prompt character (usually ">") appeared
at the beginning of every line containing user input.
So, when I added the "OBEY" command to execute commands from a file,
I made it optionally only take notice of commands on a line prefixed
by the prompt character - all other lines would be treated as comments.
This meant that I could feed a transcript file straight back into the
game program as a command file with no editing necessary, even if the
game had been played at maximum verbosity.

Bear in mind I was used to playing games on a mainframe, not on a PC.
Capturing the output from (and feeding a list of commands to) a game
program was simplicity itself: all you had to do was run the program
over a pseudo-terminal.  In fact, I probably still have the set of
command files I used while I was solving the original "dungeon" (aka
zork) - I certainly still have a hardcopy of the final transcript.
As such, adding an "OBEY" command was only making certain operations
rather more convenient, not adding any new functionality.  Mind you,
I would probably still put such a capability into any game system I
wrote today  -  does TADS have this feature automatically built in?

P.S. Would anyone be interested in a TADS version of mainframe zork?
I keep on thinking about putting something like this together, and
it is becoming apparent that TADS is probably the way to go.
I'm talking about a version including everything up to the Don Woods
stamp - if anyone knows of puzzles added later than that one I would
be very interested to hear about them.
-- 
John Francis                                 johnf@apollo.hp.com
with 9 cats to feed, I don't have time to think up a clever .sig
