Ninneman. Eric received Don Woods's encouragement to update and ship
the game; Jason signed on early in the process to help. The assistance
of Peje Nilsson in restructuring some particularly grotty gotos is
-gratefully acknowledged. Petr Voropaev contributed fuzz testing.
+gratefully acknowledged. Petr Voropaev contributed fuzz testing and
+code cleanups. Aaron Traas did a lot of painstaking work to improve
+test coverage.
== Nomenclature ==
== Philosophy ==
Extreme care has been taken not to make changes that would alter the
-logic of the game as we received it from Don Woods. By policy, all
-user-visible changes must be revertible with the -o (oldstyle) option.
+logic of the game as we received it from Don Woods, except to fix
+glitches that were clearly bugs. By policy, all user-visible
+changes to gameplay must be revertible with the -o (oldstyle) option.
-It is a goal of this project to exactly preserve the *behavior* of
-430-point Adventure, but the implementation of it is fair game for
-improvement. In particular, we are concerned to move it to a form that
-is (a) readable, and (b) friendly to forward translation to future
-languages. It has already survived a move from FORTRAN to C; a future
-as a Python or Go translation seems possible, even probable.
+It is a goal of this project to exactly preserve the *intended
+behavior* of 430-point Adventure, but the implementation of it is fair
+game for improvement. In particular, we are concerned to move it to a
+form that is (a) readable, and (b) friendly to forward translation to
+future languages. It has already survived a move from FORTRAN to C; a
+future as a Python or Go translation seems possible, even probable.
== Functional changes ==
+Bug fixes:
+
+* Reading the relocated Witt's End sign in the endgame didn't work right.
+
+* Behavior when saying the giant's magic words outside his room wasn't
+ quite correct - the game responded as though the player were in
+ the room ("...can't you read?"). The new message is "Well, that was
+ remarkably pointless."
+
+* Attempting to extinguish an unlit urn caused it to lose its oil.
+
+* "A crystal bridge now spans the fissure." (progressive present) was
+ incorrect most places it appeared and has been replaced by "A crystal
+ bridge spans the fissure." (timeless present).
+
By default, advent issues "> " as a command prompt. This feature
became common in many variants after the original 350-point version,
but was never backported into Crowther & Woods's main line before now.
-The "-o" (oldstyle) version reverts the behavior.
+The "-o" (oldstyle) option reverts the behavior.
+
+There is a set of standard one-letter command aliases conventional in modern
+text adventure games; 'l' and 'x'; for 'look' (or 'examine'), 'z' to do nothing
+for a turn, 'i' for 'inventory', 'g' for 'get', and 'd' for 'drop'. The 'd'
+alias collides with 'd' for 'down', but the others have been implemented.
+The "-o" (oldstyle) option disables them.
+
+Unrecognized words are no longer truncated to 5 characters and
+uppercased when they are echoed. The "-o" (oldstyle) option restores
+this behavior.
A "seed" command has been added. This is not intended for human use
but as a way for game logs to set the PRNG (pseudorandom-number generator) so
suite for the game. Any log captured with -l (and thus containing
a "seed" command) will replay reliably, including random events.
-The adventure.text file is no longer required at runtime. Instead, it
-is compiled at build time to a source module containing C structures,
-which is then linked to the advent binary. There is an adventure.yaml file
-as well; this is also compiled to C code, and will eventually replace
-adventure.text altogether.
+The adventure.text file is no longer required at runtime. Instead, an
+adventure.yaml file is compiled at build time to a source module
+containing C structures, which is then linked to the advent
+binary. The YAML is drastically easier to read and edit than
+the old ad-hoc format of adventure.txt.
The game-save format has changed. This was done to simplify the
FORTRAN-derived code that formerly implemented the save/restore
Jason Ninneman and I have moved it to what is almost, but not quite,
idiomatic modern C. We refactored the right way, checking correctness
against a comprehensive test suite that we built first and verified
-with coverage tools (we now have over 90% coverage, with the remaining
+with coverage tools (we have over 95% coverage, with the remaining
confined to exception cases that are very difficult to reach). This is
what you are running when you do "make check".
-In the process we found and fixed a few minor bugs. Most notably, reading
-the relocated Witt's End sign in the endgame didn't work. Behavior when
-saying the giant's magic words outside his room wasn't quite right either.
-
The move to modern C entailed some structural changes. The most
important was the refactoring of over 350 gotos into if/loop/break
structures. We also abolished almost all shared globals; the main one
verb was one of these words, and what would be string operations in a
more recent language were all done on sequences of these words.
-We are still in the process of removing all this bit-packing cruft
-in favor of proper C strings. C strings may be a weak and leaky
-abstraction, but this is one of the rare cases in which they are
-an obvious improvement over what they're displacing...
+We have removed all this bit-packing cruft in favor of proper C
+strings. C strings may be a weak and leaky abstraction, but this is
+one of the rare cases in which they are an obvious improvement over
+what they're displacing...
We have also conducted extensive fuzz testing on the game using
afl (American Fuzzy Lop). We've found and fixed some crashers in
-our new code (which occasionally uses malloc(3)) but none as yet
+our new code (which occasionally uses malloc(3)), but none as yet
in Don's old code (which didn't).
The code falls short of being fully modern C in the following
to fix it because doing so would (a) be quite difficult, and (b)
compromise forward-portability to other languages.
-* Much of the code still uses FORTRAN-style uppercase names.
-
-* The code still assumes one-origin array indexing. Thus, arrays are
- a cell larger than they strictly need to be and cell 0 is unused.
+* Much of the code still assumes one-origin array indexing. Thus,
+ arrays are a cell larger than they strictly need to be and cell 0 is
+ unused.
* The code is still mostly typeless, slinging around machine longs
like a FORTRAN or BCPL program. Some (incomplete) effort has been made
to introduce semantic types.
+We have made exactly one minor architectural change. In addition to the
+old code's per-object state-description messages, we now have a per-object
+message series for state *changes*. This makes it possible to pull a fair
+amount of text out of the arbitrary-messages list and associate those
+mesages with the objects that conceptually own them.
+
// end