X-Git-Url: https://jxself.org/git/?p=open-adventure.git;a=blobdiff_plain;f=history.adoc;h=085394462c7f300a0669a25d0a2a46d0b9c40e40;hp=a8623cf2e5d21a9242e477847f64e284fef26b91;hb=e5a0c6e2b723186e452747bccef5f3386ce2f2f9;hpb=75bf848ecd179e418a851df32e8352277d38dab6 diff --git a/history.adoc b/history.adoc index a8623cf..0853944 100644 --- a/history.adoc +++ b/history.adoc @@ -23,15 +23,16 @@ in the 1995 release of Adventure 2.5, also known as 430-point Adventure The earliest port to C was by Jim Gillogly under an early Unix running at the Rand Corporation in 1977; this version was later, and still is, -included in the BSD Games collection. It was blessed by Crowther and -Woods and briefly marketed in 1981 under the name "The Original -Adventure". +included in the BSD Games collection. I have it from Don Woods directly +that "[Jim Gillogly] was one of the first to request and receive a copy +of the source" but that Woods did not actually know of the BSD port +until I briefed him on it in 2017. (This contradicts some implications +in third-party histories.) Many other people ported and extended the game in various directions. A notable version was the first game shipped for the IBM Personal -Computer in 1981; this, for which neither Crowther nor Woods nor -Gillogly were paid royalties, what "The Original" was competing -against. +Computer in 1981; neither Crowther nor Woods nor Gillogly were paid +royalties. The history of these non-mainline versions is complex and murky. Functional differences were generally marked by changes in the @@ -40,17 +41,18 @@ ports of some versions existed - some in FORTRAN, some in C, some in other languages - so the maximum point score is not completely disambiguating. -Same articles at <> are a narrative of the history of the -game. There is an in-depth study of its origins at <>. -Many versions are collected at The Interactive Fiction Archive -<>; note however that its dates for the earliest releases -don't match other comments in the code or the careful reconstruction -in <>. +Same articles at <> are a narrative of the history of the game. +There is an in-depth study of its origins at <>. Many versions +are collected at The Interactive Fiction Archive <>; note however +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 <>. -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. +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 +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 @@ -64,7 +66,7 @@ open-source licensing were not yet fully established. The Makefile contained a rights reservation by Don Woods and that was it. I wrote to Don asking permission to release 2.5 under 2-clause BSD; -he replied on 15 May giving both permission and encouragement. +he replied on 15 May 2017 giving both permission and encouragement. Here is what Don said about differences between the original Adventure and 2.5: @@ -126,53 +128,16 @@ and minicomputer-centered culture Crowther and Woods were part of until well after Adventure was written. (I was a developer of the Nethack roguelike early in that game's -history; we knew of Hunt The Wumpus then from its early Unix port, but -it didn't influence us either, nor in any apparent way the designers -of other early roguelikes. After my time the wumpus was included as a -monster in Nethack, but this was done in a spirit of conscious -museumization after historians rediscovered Yob's game.) +history, in the late 1980s; we knew nothing of PLATO dnd. We did know +of Hunt The Wumpus then from its early Unix port, but it didn't +influence us either, nor in any apparent way the designers of other +early roguelikes. After my time the wumpus was included as a monster +in Nethack, but this was done in a spirit of conscious museumization +after historians rediscovered Yob's game.) Neither of these games used an attempt at a natural-language parser even as primitive as Adventure's. -== Nomenclature == - -This project is called "Open Adventure" because it's not at all clear -to number Adventure past 2.5 without misleading or causing -collisions. Various of the non-mainline versions have claimed to be -versions 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and for all I know higher than that. It seems -best just to start a new numbering series while acknowledging the -links back. - -We have reverted to "advent" for the binary to avoid a name collision -with the BSD Games version. - -== Functional changes in Open Adventure == - -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. - -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 -that random events (dwarf & pirate appearances, the bird's magic word) -will be reproducible. - -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 -early in the file capturing the randomized start state of the PRNG -so that replays of the log will be reproducible. - -Using "seed" and -l, the distribution now includes a regression-test -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. - == Sources == [bibliography] @@ -186,3 +151,5 @@ which is then linked to the advent binary. - [[[DND]]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnd_(video_game) - [[[WUMPUS]]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus + +- [[[QUUX]]] https://github.com/Quuxplusone/Advent