Fix typo in the NEWS file (2016 -> 2017)

[open-adventure.git] / history.adoc

diff --git a/history.adoc b/history.adoc
index 7c8bff6d97220be292f6a41eb4c9701c0b2c4eb5..d33f448f1481f7e31b2753433a7ed9e49a7e31b4 100644 (file)
--- 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
@@ -48,10 +50,13 @@ 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 <<SN>>.
 
-Future versions of this document may attempt to untangle some of the
-non-mainline history. For now, it will suffice to explain the chain of
-provenance that led from the original Adventure to the version
-distributed with this document.
+== Open Adventure ==
+
+An attempt to untangle and document a lot of the non-mainline history
+has been made by Arthur O'Dwyer at <<QUUX>>.  For our purposes, it
+will suffice to explain the chain of provenance that led from the
+original Adventure to the Open Adventure distributed with this
+document.
 
 The original 350-point ADVENT on the PDP-10 had been one of my
 formative experiences as a fledgling hacker in 1976-77. Forty years
@@ -109,6 +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",
@@ -150,3 +163,5 @@ even as primitive as Adventure's.
 - [[[DND]]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnd_(video_game)
 
 - [[[WUMPUS]]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus
+
+- [[[QUUX]]] https://github.com/Quuxplusone/Advent