The Visible Zorker: Zork 1

(eblong.com)

97 points by PLenz8 hours ago

3 comments

Joe_Cool6 hours ago
This is neat. Z-machine internals without needing to run a debugger.
- ghaff6 hours ago
  Very cool. Did a very little testing for Infocom back in the day and knew a lot of the folks involved.
raffael_de4 hours 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?
- jhbadger57 minutes ago
  There's also ZIL by way of ZILF <a href="https://github.com/taradinoc/zilf" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/taradinoc/zilf</a> This is the Lisp-like language that Infocom implementers actually used back in the day.
- svachalek3 hours 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.<p>Arguably, the right answer now is to document everything that matters to you about the adventure, and tell an LLM to run it.
  - m4633 hours ago
    I wonder if you could make a "choose-your-own-adventure" book uning LLMs.<p>It would write the book ahead of you, kind of like how railroads could send trains with supplies out to the track as it was built.
    - taormina3 hours ago
      Like with any LLM produced project, can you? Sure. Will it be engaging, well written or consistent? Almost certainly not.
- dwheeler3 hours ago
  I think Inform 7 is pretty cool. I suggest checking in to that as well.
- anthk3 hours 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.<p><a href="https://jxself.org/git/" rel="nofollow">https://jxself.org/git/</a>
projektfu4 hours 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.
- II2II1 hour ago
  It has been a while since I've played interactive fiction, so I can't make a specific suggestion, but modern games seem to be better at keeping the directions consistent (or at least providing clues when they are not). As others have noted, older games broke directionality to serve as puzzles -- failing to acknowledge that some people have a sense of direction while following twisty paths!<p>Newer games also tend to follow some quality of life rules in their design, things like avoiding arbitrary deaths and avoiding situations where the player cannot progress because they missed something earlier in the game.
- pdw3 hours ago
  Nothing to do with the VM. The game was designed that way, navigation is part of the puzzle.
- conexions4 hours ago
  Perhaps you could try making a map.
  - sllabres4 hours ago
    Or in this case; just click on "map"
- anthk3 hours 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.