From: Eric S. Raymond Date: Tue, 30 May 2017 21:47:26 +0000 (-0400) Subject: Don's account of differences from the original. X-Git-Tag: seed~4 X-Git-Url: https://jxself.org/git/?p=open-adventure.git;a=commitdiff_plain;h=dfe04a58b6a12342e1647378c823f07f7d278320 Don's account of differences from the original. --- diff --git a/history.txt b/history.txt index f3ece61..f64fef9 100644 --- a/history.txt +++ b/history.txt @@ -66,6 +66,46 @@ 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. +Here is what Don said about differences between the original Adventure +and 2.5: + +> The bulk of the points come from five new 16-point treasures. (I say "bulk" +> because I think at least one of the scores included some padding and I may +> have tweaked those.) Each of the new treasures requires solving a puzzle +> that's definitely at the tricky end of the scale for Adventure. Much of the +> new stuff involves trying new directions and/or finding new uses for stuff +> that already existed; e.g. the forest outside is no longer a small number of +> locations with partially random movement, but is a full-fledged maze, one +> that I hope has a character different from either of the previous two. +> +> As the text itself says, V2.5 is essentially the same as V2, with a few more +> hints. (I think I came up with a better one for the endgame, too.) I don't +> seem to have a copy of the similar text from V2, so I don't know whether/how +> it described itself to new and seasoned players. +> +> The other big change, as I mentioned above, was I added a way of docking +> points at a certain number of turns. This was my second attempt to do what +> the batteries had been for: require being efficient to achieve top score. +> Alas, the batteries led to players deliberately turning the lamp off/on +> whenever they weren't moving or were in a lit area, making the game take +> even longer! I set the requirement at what felt like a hard but fair +> number of turns, then applied several sneaky tricks to shave off another +> twenty. +> +> I hacked up a wrapper around the game (still in Fortran, most likely, but +> I forget) that would try each initializing the RNG using each second of a +> given day, while feeding in a script that either worked or aborted early +> if anything went wrong (such as a dwarf blocking my path). As I recall, +> it took less than a day's worth of RNG seeds to find one that worked. +> +> I verified my script could work given a favorable RNG, and stuck +> that number in the message. +> +> I like how that final puzzle, unlike the game itself, does not readily +> succumb even given access to the game source. You really need to fit +> together not only the goals and the map and use of inventory space, but +> also details like just what _can_ you do in the dark...? + == Nomenclature == This project is called "Open Adventure" because it's not at all clear