X-Git-Url: https://jxself.org/git/?p=open-adventure.git;a=blobdiff_plain;f=history.adoc;h=c3d7b3ab1b8c8893a3d94f106916076f822478ce;hp=1686645f08430c74d070059ff43a7d5aac1bae7d;hb=e09ba7244d77b843c640383794574a49835ad463;hpb=87779b71eff236df838b8d9f71b95fed71c19d0c diff --git a/history.adoc b/history.adoc index 1686645..c3d7b3a 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. @@ -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 @@ -120,54 +121,21 @@ 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]