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IF Quake Takes Fragging To Whole New Level
Thanks to ShackNews for pointing to the impressive technical feats showcased at the unofficial IF Quake page, which bills itself as "...a port of id Software's Quake 1 engine to the Inform programming language." The site includes riveting in-game screenshots, and the FAQ page has important info on bugs with this genuinely playable, downloadable Alpha release, noting: "IF Quake interfaces directly with the Quake engine, which was obviously not designed for [this advanced] output. The errors you see related to audio and OpenGL are due to the fact that the engine is being tricked into thinking it's running normally." Rumors that John Carmack will be switching Doom 3 to this impressive new engine are yet to be substantiated, however.
"IF Quake Takes Fragging To Whole New Level"
;)
HuH? If it does, what? What then!?
Yeah... While a few are funny here or there I see no need to have the entire day of news completely ruined...
now if only they can make the text 3D.
I would like some benchmarks as well..
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
... You might be eaten by a Shambler.
i am a soviet space shuttle
You are in a room with many exits. You see a rocket launcher.
:)
>Pick up Rocket Launcher
Rocket launcher picked up.
>Look.
You are in a room with many exits. You see player X leaving via exit number 1.
> Go to exit number 1.
You are in a room with many exits. You see player X.
> Fire Rocket Launcher at Player X.
Player X gibbed.
--- It's not my fault this post looks redundant. I just type too slow.
The game is fully playable, and actually pretty good fun, too.
This is obviously an April Fools bit. I mean, it says right here that "all screens were taken on Mac OS X running Zoom."
A ground-breaking new game ported to OS X? Yeah, like anyone's going to believe THAT! Better luck next year, simoniker!
(PS: I own a Mac so I'm allowed to make these jokes)
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
I contend that it is impractical, and quite possibly impossible to effectively play an FPS game using only text.
BANG! You're dead.
Shoot the red guy with what?
With the BFG.
Do what with the BFG?
Shoot the red guy with the BFG.
The red guy is no longer in the room with you. You see exits to the north and northeast. You hear a buzzing noise to the northeast.
NE
You ran into the red guy's Rocket. Your innards are splattered everywhere.
Hit space to respawn.
Will this new version support RFC 3514? The original one didn't and that's been a major barrier to adoption in the corporate world.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
> I see no need to have the entire day of news completely ruined...
/. before.
Neither do I. That's never happened on
Check out TTYQuake. :)
if anyone's waiting for someone to confirm, there is an actual game on that site. obviously not as advertised, but there's a game. haven't found anything too interesting yet, but i'll be damned if i don't beat this thing.
sig - .
We don't do no farkin' around these here parts, buddy. What site d'you say you was from? A good ol' fashioned Slashdottin'll fry ten servers before breakfast and still have time to read the comics. I don't think any fancy-pants farkin' can do that, boy.
"A witty saying proves nothing." --Voltaire
Okay, I had just finished telling my friends that, "Hooray, It's April 1st. Believe nothing. If your mom dies, it's just a prank." And then I see this story on Slashdot, and for at least 30 secs, I believe it is real. I was thinking to myself, QUAKE in Inform? The sites were Slashdotted, and then it hit me--YOU COULDN'T DO THAT WITH INFORM!. So thanks, Slashdot, I've been bamboozled already.
porp
btw, I know Inform and you could, in theory, make some serious programs, but I'm curious, what are the limits of such low level languages?
Oh, get fucking over it. If you don't like the jokes, go and do something else for the day, like read a book, or watch TV, or play a game, or whatever. Is your life so shallow that you think "news" on Slashdot is the high point of the day?
Do *anything* else, just don't come here and bitch about it.
What if life is just a side effect of some other process and God has no idea we exist?
The site is getting pounded. Here's part of it..
Mirror
And there's only 5 hours left of April 1st here in New Zealand. It's quite irritating, as you're never quite sure what timezone a website is using, so you effectively end up with 2 solid days of bullshit news stories.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
Some of them (ok the media ones usually aren't that good) are pretty good. Google's made me laugh a bit (click the link below the search field, "want a job..") and Thinkgeeks nifty products always make me laugh too.
not a very good start for April Fools.
I agree, a wee bit too contrived. The best 4/1 jokes slip right past you. I think over the years we have all learned to become hyper critical of stories posted on 4/1 thus making it harder and harder to slip one by.
It's funny you two should say that, for two reasons...
First, this isn't the first 4/1 joke. The poll and the Gmail story must have slipped by you.
Second, this isn't a joke. I downloaded it and I'm playing it right now.
Cheater!
*grumbles about wall-hacks*
Genocide MUD (link) was exactly that (well, it still is, but I haven't played it in 10 years). A multi player player killing game, insanely fast, using only text.
There'd be wars, like two teams, play until one team is dead, restart... or all vs all wars, etc. The game is a really nice MUD (text adventure style), with beautiful descriptions, monsters, treasure etc.
You run past the descriptions. The monsters explode on your entering the room, dropping their stuff, which you take immediately, to sell for weapons and healing, in the first half minute of the war.
The team play is quite complex, because of difference classes. I'm not sure if there are things like Mages in online FPS games yet? The mage could 'port' to other players, to help them defeat their opponent - or walk into a death trap. Mages were the most important position in the team, when I played.
Anyway, some of those nerds did 200+ commands per minute, without any sort of client (mostly w e n s of course, and you can make aliases). It was fast, it rocked, and it was exactly what you describe.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Rumors have already been heard that the Duke Nukem Forever team is eagerly waiting for this engine to become available.
Yeah, I'm suprised it's not some april fools joke.
:-)
Too bad I suck so bad at all these reading stuff, but for fun I tried to type "carmack" and "romero" and I got some feedback
I wonder what other little easter eggs are in this game.
----------
Check out my blackbox styles
I think you want this.
The inform language is an object orienated programming language designed for easy implementation of text based adventure games. It uses a well defined object hierarchy structure, that allows you to define parent child relationships easily, as well as move stuff around. The syntax is similar to C, but not quite, and a bit quirky with commas in parts.
Most uses of inform are with the Library, a selection of functions and support thingies written to facilitate IF writing.
It's turing complete, if you were wondering.
Very nifty. Chief competetor is TADS.
Tired of legitimate data sources? Try UNCYCLOPEDIA
Multiplayer is still just a puppy, but its coming together nicely. There still is a problem with excessive spawn camping, and its in debate right now whether or not the software should prevent it.
One guy started using voice recognition to play, which was quite a riot to listen to. As we grew more comfortable with the game we came across some other oddities: if you are a good typer and become familiar with the commands, it plays pretty much like the original quake. We even hooked it up so we had a team of IF players versus a team of graphical players, and the IF players won!
We've also receieved a lot of encouragement from a few visually impair folks. They complained about the lack of computer gains accessible to them.
Keep your eyes open for Multiplayer mode, it shoul d be a big hit. Depending on the ultimate success of the project, there are talks about working on Counterstrike next.
I think someone fragged their webserver...
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
I'm trying to keep a list of all the sites pulling pranks for 2004. Visit the site to see the up to the minute list and to submit new ones.
Current list:
www.urgo.org
mrtwig.net
southparkx.net
www.suprnova.org
www.cowsponge.com
Google
Slashdot
fark.com
www.thinkgeek.com
www.pimpworks.org
www.whirlpool.net.au
planetnintendo.com
Google Job
evercrest.com
www.heise.de (not sure if its a joke.. german)
www.homestarrunner.com
Weekly World News
Belive in Technology and AMAZE yourself. -- RIP ZDTV/TechTV
editors want to play jokes? time to start modding the "First Post!"s up to +5 Informative
No doubt! I was thinking this might just be more vaporware until I saw those screenshots; Very crisp graphics!
And of course, the imaging engine rivals that of some of the most advanced systems ever created.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
April fools!! We fucked your server!
Read jack phelps dot net
I ported Quake II to INTERCAL years ago. I claim the first use, in a FPS, of "COME FROM" and colored lighting ;-)
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Yes, it is.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Actually, it's:
> Fire Rocket Launcher at Player X.
Rocket misses.
> Fire Rocket Launcher at Player X.
Rocket appears to hit Player X, but Player X reappears a few meters away, unscathed.
Player X kills you.
"OMG FUCKING LAGGG!!!!"
Room: Slashdot Main Page
Directly in front of you are several stories. You notice a story about Quake with the notice 'Read More' beneath it.
>click notice
Room: Weekly Obfuscated Quake Story
You are now in an area that seems vaguely familiar. You immediately notice several trolls that are already attacking both the Quake story and a purple dinosaur.
Your score is currently +5 moderator points.
>attack trolls with mod points
You use all of your moderator ammo on the trolls, taking out a handful. There are still a few trolls left, but they leave you alone. The Quake story is now being protected by sensible readers, but the purple dinosaur is a hill of beans.
You see an opportunity for a karma kit. You see a notice marked 'Reply'.
>hit reply
You now see a Quake story with your post listed near the bottom, but in front of the trolls who are now attacking each other. Two moderators enter the room, closely followed by an Anonymous Coward and two morons who don't know how to read.
>hit submit story
Your post has drawn the attention of the others in the room. The faint smell of flamebait seems to be coming from just below your post. Five trolls have suddenly come back to life!
>attack flamebait with witty reply
Your witty attack has shot down one of the non-reading morons. One of the moderators takes care of the Anonymous Coward - he runs off to foul up some other room. The other moderator leaves behind a karma point.
Victory is yours!
insignificant sig
...some friends and i did something like this several years ago, but sicker. we used to run a MUD (which is sadly defunct now, but was called Powerstruggle for all those of you who fancy a google), and we had a "virtual mud" system within it. as in, a system you could use, while in the mud, and as though you're immersing yourself in a (textual) virtual reality, you end up within a different system, with different stats, your commands routed to the virtual mud, etc etc.
:>
the first application of this was, in fact, to reimplement doom as a text-based virtual environment within the mud, with its own stats, weapons, maps, and so forth. it worked splendidly.
what started as a bit of fun, we then reimplemented a different mud within this virtual system. it was a simple one, so it wasn't anything huge to do.
then, it was abstracted a bit to allow other muds to run under it. so we gave homes to orphaned muds, which were playable as virtual muds within our mud.
and then even worse, it got extrapolated so other sorts of games could be written under it. last i remember, someone had implemented the Magic:The Gathering card game under this system.
ah, muds. back when we all had time to goof off and spend 16 hours a day coding, but not on our CS degrees. having said that, my mud work got me my first two jobs rather than my degree, so things sometimes work out in the end
Inform is a language that makes writing interactive fiction (a subset of which are text adventures, like Zork and Adventure) easy. It's pretty flexible, as well. Tetris has been ported to it, for instance. It compiles to a z-machine file, interpreters for which exist on just about every platform known to man, including handhelds.
There are many other IF languages, TADS being the most popular besides Inform.
There is still a thriving interactive fiction "scene" and some very interesting things are being done with the medium (Photopia, Galatea).
Here:
e st%20of %202003%20Screenshots%2C%20by%20Tei
http://wiki.quakesrc.org/index.php/Engines
This is a short list of actual Quake engines. You can pick DarkPlaces and ZQuake has the best Linux/Windows engine (QW and NQ), and fuhquake/Darkplaces/Telejano has the better Windows engines (QW,NQ and NQ respectively).
If you want to jump directly to the cool stuf, go here:
http://wiki.quakesrc.org/index.php/The%20b
If you use linux, copy and paste the url, if you use windows, type it carefully (naa.. j/k)
-Woof woof woof!
Here's an actual snippet, taken from a game I was working on years ago.
Sorry about the thin-to-nonexistant indentation, but the postercomment
compression filter makes it really hard to post source code segments:
Object fridge "refrigerator" kitchen2
with
name 'fridge' 'refrigerator' 'kenmore' 'freezer',
description "It's a Kenmore combination refrigerator and freezer.
The front is covered with irrelevant notes from days gone by.",
before [;
Take: "Oh, you ", (pbold) "want", " a hernia?";
Open: if (cupboard hasnt general) {
give cupboard general;
"You open the refrigerator, but there's no light inside.
Suddenly, you realise that nothing in the house is running.
In your worry, you had neglected to notice that your music
had stopped playing. The refrigerator isn't even humming.
The power must be out. You reclose the refrigerator to
keep it from loosing its cool. The only sounds are coming
from the storm outside -- storm? There wasn't any storm
earlier.";
}
"You don't want to open the refrigerator with the power out; if
it gets too warm in there everything will spoil.";
],
has openable container scenery;
This is a simple object, a refrigerator. Other objects and code may refer to
it as fridge. "refrigerator" is the hardwired short name, which is what it
will be called when the game is talking to the player, in the absense of a
short_name property. (Giving an object a short_name property allows you to
do more complex things, like change the name in mid-game, determine the name
each time on the fly with a routine, or cetera.) kitchen2 is the parent
object, in this case the "room" where the refrigerator is located at the
start of the game. (This particular object will _stay_ there, because the
scenery attribute prevents the user from carting it around. Normally the
static attribute is used for that, but scenery also prevents it from being
mentioned automatically, which is useful for objects that you want to mention
manually in room descriptions.) The name property contains dictionary words
that the player may use to refer to the object; more complex objects can have
a parse_name routine, but for the refrigerator the name property is good
enough. The description property in this case is a string, though it could
just as well be a routine; anyway, it's used when the user looks at the
object. The before property holds a routine that gets a crack at doing
whatever it wants just before an action happens, whenever the user attempts
something with the object. In this case, if the user attempts to take the
refrigerator the routine prints a snide remark (and, since it uses the
implicit print_ret feature, it returns true, which prevents the action from
taking place). If the user tries to open the refrigerator, an attribute on
another object is tested, and an appropriate message is printed (again, using
the implicit print_ret to return true and prevent the action). (What the
cupboard object has to do with the player knowing the power is an interesting
question; I don't remember, to tell the truth; this code is several years old,
and I have barely looked at it ad interim.)
This is a very typical segment of code. With just a little practice, Inform
code is very easy to read. The really great thing about Inform, though, is
not the language itself, but the Designer's Manual. The DM *rocks*. It's
one of the three or four best computer books I've ever read. Especially the
section on the world model, with the Ruins example code. You can download
it for free, or I suspect you can still get a print copy, though I've
forgotten where. (Go to Google groups and ask on rec.arts.int-fiction
and someone will know for sure.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
You cannot get ye flask!
Hi everyone...I've moved the actual downloadable files to FileShack, as my server's being hammered relentlessly:
All three versions can be downloaded here:
http://www.fileshack.com/file.x?fid=4807
Thanks!
-jason
PS: YES, this is a real game.
That's a bug, I'm afraid...you have to press the button on the wall, except there's no way of knowing it's actually there!
:(
Just type "press button" and it will work.
Sorry about that. In the rush to get it out last night, I missed that one.
(This will be fixed in a release tonight)
What it really is is just damn clever. It would be interesting to see if this provokes a more mainstream interest in interactive fiction.
Schnapple