From: Eric S. Raymond Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2018 15:26:22 +0000 (-0500) Subject: History update. X-Git-Tag: 1.5~9 X-Git-Url: https://jxself.org/git/?a=commitdiff_plain;h=c0a4d55d6cb21c70af69d2ed6d5d4544c382539e;p=open-adventure.git History update. --- diff --git a/history.adoc b/history.adoc index 0853944..d33f448 100644 --- a/history.adoc +++ b/history.adoc @@ -5,6 +5,8 @@ Adventure is the fons et origo of all later dungeon-crawling computer games, the grandaddy of interactive fiction, and one of the hallowed artifacts of hacker folklore. +== Origin and history == + The very first version was released by Crowther in 1976, in FORTRAN on the PDP-10 at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman. (Crowther was at the time writing what we could now call firmware for the earliest ARPANET @@ -48,6 +50,8 @@ that IFA's historical claims are thinly sourced and its dates for the earliest releases don't match either comments in the code or the careful reconstruction in <>. +== Open Adventure == + An attempt to untangle and document a lot of the non-mainline history has been made by Arthur O'Dwyer at <>. For our purposes, it will suffice to explain the chain of provenance that led from the @@ -110,6 +114,14 @@ and 2.5: > also details like just what _can_ you do in the dark...? ............................................................................ +Great care has been taken to preserve 2.5's exact gameplay as intended +by Don. However, under the hood Open Adventure is rather different from +2.5. Where 2.5 was written in FORTRAN mechanically translated into extremely +ugly C, Open Adventure has been translated into much more modern and +idiomatic C. The extremely cryptic and opaque format of the original +database of rooms, objects, and strings has been moved to YAML; +this makes the brilliant design of it much easier to comprehend. + == Earlier non-influences == There is record of one earlier dungeon-crawling game called "dnd",