Slashdot Mirror
Interactive Fiction Competition Opens
Sargent1 writes "The 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition has opened for business. The yearly competition, now celebrating its tenth anniversary, is for short pieces of interactive fiction. At this point IF authors can sign up to take part in the competition, and everyone can learn how to judge the games when they are released in October of this year. If you're not sure what interactive fiction is, take a look at Slashdot's recent review of Twisty Little Passages, a book on interactive fiction from Adventure (and earlier antecedents) to present day."
No, it's not such a difficult concept. It's simply a synonym for "Text-based Adventure Game". For those of us who were not yet born when the genre started, it's Quake _without_ the visual feedback, or the sound, or the mission objective. It's the Quake of a time when computers were not powerful enough to play Quake. Now, for some reason, some people are still in love with the old way ... and these are good people .....................
;-)
___________
says a young programmer & weblog newbie to even younger programmers
Those interested in the contest might want to check out these resources for getting started with Inform. And for a short ten-minute adventure, I will engage in some self-publicity and recommend Escape from Station V.
Yes, but Inform and TADS already have excellent text parsers written for you, making life much simpler once you know the language. So you have to ask yourself which is more convenient - learning a new language to get a free parser or writing the parser yourself in a language you already know.
You also don't have to worry about cross-compatibility with the IF languages. Both of these languages create pseudo-code that runs under a virtual machine. Sort of the way Java works. If you code in C++, even if you write it to be truly portable it will still need to be compiled on each machine people want it run on.
To each his own, but you should at least take a good look at Inform/TAGS/Hugo.
Adam Cadre's stuff is pretty cool. IF isn't dead, not by a long shot.
If you already know C, you're MUCH better off just spending a couple of hours picking up the idiosyncracies of Inform. 99% of your work will be wasted if you try to write IF from scratch in C.
The Kingdom of Loathing
Lots of BBSes still around that you can access via telnet:
http://www.3dham.com/telnet/
...by the esteemed David Wong. Warning: some of these stories will be quite possibly the stupidest thing you'll ever read.
I'm probably at the karma cap. Mod up a funny troll instead, it lightens the mood
If you're a fan and haven't played it, or just feel like taking a little trip back:
>Go Underdogs
[Using your web browser]You see a website offering tons of cool underrated games
>Examine Games
You see a list of hundreds of IF games"
>Get HHGTG
You download one of the best IF games ever
>Play game
[using Frotz] You play for a while before feeling a presence behind you. The lights go out. You have been eaten by a grue.
Pic
Technoli
Well, about every serious interactive fiction author (especially Inform and TADS).
The language websites for Hugo, Inform etc explain that they have been designed specifically for text based adventure games.... Talk about specialization !!!!
What's wrong with specialization? There are so many things that are the same in every int-fic game, that reprogramming it everytime would be a waste of effort (parser, feedback from user).
Any way I have registered and am going to do plain old C ( okay, okay C++)
You are not serious, are you? C/C++ is about the least suitable language for any kind of string manipulation. You maybe could write something in Ruby, scheme, or Perl... But even commercial (graphical) adventure games start by writing an engine for their product. If you know C/C++, it will be not so much effort to learn any of this languages (much less than starting from scratch).
The correct answer to this mind-bending puzzle is, "unlock door with key".
Can something like www.ruaware.org qualify as interactive fiction? It is very interactive and fiction.
The Scott Adam's games were great! There the IF games that I cut my teeth on. I played them on cartidge and/or cassette on my C-Vic-20. God the games were time consuming and frustrating but still a blast! Stupid time limits on em' always killed me, specially the one where you have to kill Dracula afore the sun rises! *grumbles*
Jay Dale "If you're not living on the edge then you're taking up too much space!"