= Open Adventure Maintainer's Notes =
by Eric S. Raymond
+// SPDX-FileCopyrightText: (C) 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 ==
future languages. It has already survived a move from FORTRAN to C; a
future as a Python or Go translation seems possible, even probable.
+Compatibility with the 2.5 source we found has been checked by
+building a version patched minimally to support the seed command and
+running it against the entire test suite, which has 100% code
+coverage.
+
== Functional changes ==
Bug fixes:
+* The caged bird used to be counted as two items in your inventory.
+
* 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."
-
+* Oyster was readable after first gotten even when not carried.
+
+* 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
bridge spans the fissure." (timeless present).
* A few minor typos have been corrected: absence of capitalization on
- "Swiss" and "Persian", inconsistent selling of "imbedded" vs. "embedded",
- "eying" for "eyeing". "thresholds" for "threshholds".
+ "Swiss" and "Persian", inconsistent spelling of "imbedded" vs. "embedded",
+ "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).
+ formerly say "floor" when it should say "ground" (or "dirt", or something).
+
+Enhancements:
By default, advent issues "> " as a command prompt. This feature
became common in many variants after the original 350-point version,
that random events (dwarf & pirate appearances, the bird's magic word)
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
file path argument) each command entered will be logged to the
specified file. Additionally, a generated "seed" command will be put
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.
+An -a command-line option has been added (conditionally 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 ==
The 2.5 code was a mechanical C translation of a FORTRAN original.
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:
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
messages with the objects that conceptually own them.
+== Development status ==
+
+We consider this project finished. All issues and TODOs have been
+cleared, behavior has been carefully checked against original ADVENT,
+no future demand for new features is expected, and the test suite has
+100% code coverage. If new bugs appear as the toolchain bit-rots out
+from under underneath, we will fix those problems.
+
// end
projects / open-adventure.git / blobdiff