= Open Adventure Maintainer's Notes =
by Eric S. Raymond
+// SPDX-FileCopyrightText: Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>
+// SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0
In which we explain what has been done to this code since Don Woods
authorized us to ship it under an open-source license. There's a
of Peje Nilsson in restructuring some particularly grotty gotos is
gratefully acknowledged. Petr Voropaev contributed fuzz testing and
code cleanups. Aaron Traas did a lot of painstaking work to improve
-test coverage, and factored out the last handful of gotos.
+test coverage, and factored out the last handful of gotos. Ryan
+Sarson nudged us into fixing a longstannding minor bug in the
+handling of incorrect magic-word sequebcesm,
== Nomenclature ==
* Oyster was readable after first gotten even when not carried.
-* 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 "Nothing happens."
-
+* Response to an attempt to unlock the oyster while carrying it was incorrect.
+
+* Behavior when saying the giant's magic words before having seen them
+ wasn't quite correct - the game responded as though the player had
+ already read them ("...can't you read?"). The new message is "Well,
+ that was remarkably pointless!" The -o option reverts this change.
+
* Attempting to extinguish an unlit urn caused it to lose its oil.
* "A crystal bridge now spans the fissure." (progressive present) was
* A few minor typos have been corrected: absence of capitalization on
"Swiss" and "Persian", inconsistent spelling of "imbedded" vs. "embedded",
- "eying" for "eyeing". "thresholds" for "threshholds".
+ "eying" for "eyeing", "thresholds" for "threshholds".
* Under odd circumstances (dropping rug or vase outdoors) the game could
- say "floor" when it should say "ground" (or "dirt", or something).
-
-Bugs (accidental changes that don't seem worth the effort to fix):
-
-* Commands that are not moves (e.g. "look" and "inven") can be used
- during fee fie fo foo without breaking recognition of the sequence.
-
-* Bird starts uncaged in the endgame.
+ formerly say "floor" when it should say "ground" (or "dirt", or something).
Enhancements:
will be reproducible.
A "version" command has been added. This has no effect on gameplay.
+
The text displayed by the "news" command has been updated.
A -l command-line option has been added. When this is given (with a
functions; without C's fread(3)/fwrite() and structs it was
necessarily pretty ugly by modern standards. Encryption and
checksumming have been discarded - it's pointless to try
-tamper-proofing saves when everyone has the source code.
+tamper-proofing saves when everyone has the source code. However
+the game still integrity-checks savefiles on resume, including an
+abort if the endianness of the restoring machine does not match that of
+the saving machine. There is a magic-cookie header on the saves so
+in theory they could be identified by programs like file(1).
+
+Save and resume filenames are stripped of leading and trailing
+whitespace before processing.
A -r command-line option has been added. When it is given (with a file
path argument) it is functionally equivalent to a RESTORE command.
-The game can be built in a mode that entirely disables save/resume, or
-thart autosaves only on a termination signal (for use in BBS doort
-systems). There is a new nmessage to inform the user about this.
+An -a command-line option has been added (comditionally on
+ADVENT_AUTOSAVE) for use in BBS door systems. When this option is
+given, the game roads from the specified filename argument on startup
+and saves to it on quit or a received signal. There is a new nmessage
+to inform the user about this.
+
+The game can be built in a mode that entirely disables save/resume
+(-DADVENT_NOSAVE). If the game had been built this way, a diagnostic is
+emitted if you try to save or resume.
== Translation ==
our new code (which occasionally uses malloc(3)), but none as yet
in Don's old code (which didn't).
+After version 1.11, correctness was carefully checked against the
+behavior of a binary from before the big refactoring.
+
The code falls short of being fully modern C in the following
ways: