X-Git-Url: https://jxself.org/git/?p=open-adventure.git;a=blobdiff_plain;f=history.adoc;h=43bc350286a24892b1261285e09135c27e0d0e09;hp=1686645f08430c74d070059ff43a7d5aac1bae7d;hb=c7aecb7249930ba3eafccfcd61e5b1af203a8b53;hpb=87779b71eff236df838b8d9f71b95fed71c19d0c diff --git a/history.adoc b/history.adoc index 1686645..43bc350 100644 --- a/history.adoc +++ b/history.adoc @@ -13,7 +13,7 @@ Kentucky, including fewer of the D&D-like elements now associated with the game. Adventure as we now know it, the ancestor of all later versions, was -was released on a PDP-10 at the Stanford AI Lab by Don Woods in 1977 +released on a PDP-10 at the Stanford AI Lab by Don Woods in 1977 (some sources, apparently erroneously, say 1976). That version is sometimes known as 350-point Adventure. @@ -120,54 +120,21 @@ rediscovered by computer historians many years after Adventure shipped. There was also Hunt The Wumpus <>, written by Gregory Yob in -1972. Though the wumpus was (much) later included as a monster in the -Nethack roguelike game, this was done in a spirit of conscious -museumization well after early roguelikes. There is no evidence that -Yob's original (circulated in BASIC among microcomputer enthusiasts) -was known to the ARPANET- and minicomputer-centered culture Crowther -and Woods were part of until well after Adventure was written. +1972. There is no evidence that Yob's original (circulated +in BASIC among microcomputer enthusiasts) was known to the ARPANET- +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.) 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]