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Randy Hyde's HLA Begets OS Adventure Game
jg21 writes "Paul Panks already has 30 text adventure games to his credit, and he's just written a report at LinuxWorld explaining how, when he came across Randall Hyde's website, he realized that Hyde's High Level Assembly language warranted a new departure - writing an open-source textadventure game. The result is "HLA Adventure" which he released into the public domain so anyone may contribute to the expansion of the game world, creatures within the world, and additional quests. HLA Adventure has its own Yahoo group." We recently covered HLA in our Developers section.
looks very productive, maybe someone at the valve should take a look at it?
Ever since I first programmed on a MUD the ease of letting people add content amazed me (possibly because I was much younger than I am now). There's something to be said about a game language that has a 'wiki' level of interaction. The word would be 'neat' if there was any amount of quality assurance that was applied to this concept. Unfortunately there isn't, which resulted in why I left many *Mud projects and why this probably won't work as well as it does in theory.
schild
editor, f13.net
Why does it have to be HLA? Color text? Or is it for some esoteric platforms with 32KB memory? If not so, using Perl will suffice to make a text adv. Or even JavaScript and a web browser.
(not that you're looking for the story, as this is Slashdot)
I wonder what kind of an adventure game it is given that the developer's name is Randy Hyde.
> Aren't the Infocom games written in their own language for a virtual machine?
They were written for the so-called Z-machine. Many Z-machine games are written in Inform nowadays.
Sentimentality is merely the Bank Holiday of cynicism.
- Oscar Wilde
if(lo[ebx*4]=-1) then // wear the damn thing /PAP // wear the damn thing /PAP
if(s>19 && s<26) then
mov(205,lo[ebx*4]);
console.setAttrs( console.white, console.blue );
stdout.puts("Worn." nl);
jmp parse;
endif;
if(s=55) then
mov(205,lo[ebx*4]);
console.setAttrs( console.cyan, console.blue );
stdout.puts("The shroud feels warm!" nl);
console.setAttrs( console.white, console.blue );
stdout.puts("Worn." nl);
jmp parse;
endif;
endif;
Assembly language is absolutely, with no doubt, the wrong language for writing adventure games.
To answer the above:
I chose HLA because it was a relatively new programming experience for me. I wrote adventure games in BASIC for so long, that I grew tired of the language.
HLA -- on the other hand -- seems like a very interesting programming language. BASIC teaches somewhat backward fundamentals, but those have carried over into a plethora of BASIC interpreters and compilers over the years.
Just look at PowerBASIC and Liberty BASIC, to name a few. Despite flaws, non-Dartmouth BASIC has thrived for a long time. Now it is on the wane.
Basically, HLA is at once the most curious and most interesting language I have ever come across. Is it the best for writing text adventures? No. Inform or TADS, in my opinion, fit the bill better. But does HLA serve a useful purpose? Absolutely.
It was a challenge to write HLA Adventure because I was (and still am) so new to the language. But I love challenges. I wrote a few text adventures in Sylvain Bizorre's Mini-BASIC. I even tried one in HLA Basic. In fact, I squeezed a version of my game "Westfront PC: The Trials of Guilder" into a 24K version for the Commodore 64, Commodore Plus/4 and Vic-20:
http://www.geocities.com/dunric/pauladv.html
Text adventures are great fun, even if they don't usually display graphics (Magnetic Scrolls "The Pawn" is a good exception to this). I believe adventure games (especially text adventures) allow users to explore inner worlds within the mind. Infocom and Zork used a similar ad in the early 1980's when discussing the "power" of the brain in generating graphics.
So, to recap, I believe HLA was a challenge to write an adventure game in and so I picked that challenge instead of using another language (such as BASIC, which I have used so often that I can code an adventure game the size of HLA Adventure in under two weeks).
I have a lot to learn about programming. I am a novice at C/C++, I don't know Python, and I am still very inexperienced at HLA. BASIC is about the only language I know by heart.
Sincerely,
Paul Panks
dunric@yahoo.com
Few cats act their age, while most just cough up fur balls.
I chose HLA because it was a relatively new programming experience for me. I wrote
adventure games in BASIC for so long, that I grew tired of the language.
HLA -- on the other hand -- seems like a very interesting programming
language. BASIC teaches somewhat backward fundamentals, but those have
carried over into a plethora of BASIC interpreters and compilers over
the years.
Just look at PowerBASIC and Liberty BASIC, to name a few. Despite
flaws, non-Dartmouth BASIC has thrived for a long time. Now it is
on the wane.
Basically, HLA is at once the most curious and most interesting language I
have ever come across. Is it the best for writing text adventures? No. Inform
or TADS, in my opinion, fit the bill better. But does HLA serve a useful
purpose? Absolutely.
It was a challenge to write HLA Adventure because I was (and still am) so
new to the language. But I love challenges. I wrote a few text adventures
in Sylvain Bizorre's Mini-BASIC. I even tried one in HLA Basic. In fact, I
squeezed a version of my game "Westfront PC: The Trials of Guilder" into
a 24K version for the Commodore 64, Commodore Plus/4 and Vic-20:
http://www.geocities.com/dunric/pauladv.html
Text adventures are great fun, even if they don't usually display
graphics (Magnetic Scrolls "The Pawn" is a good exception to this). I believe
adventure games (especially text adventures) allow users to explore inner worlds
within the mind. Infocom and Zork used a similar ad in the early 1980's when
discussing the "power" of the brain in generating graphics.
So, to recap, I believe HLA was a challenge to write an adventure game in and so
I picked that challenge instead of using another language (such as BASIC, which I
have used so often that I can code an adventure game the size of HLA Adventure
in under two weeks).
I have a lot to learn about programming. I am a novice at C/C++, I don't know
Python, and I am still very inexperienced at HLA. BASIC is about the only language
I know by heart.
Sincerely,
Paul Panks
dunric@yahoo.com
Few cats act their age, while most just cough up fur balls.
Hello,
As of June 12, 2004, "HLA Adventure" is released into the Public Domain.
The Creative Commons License for "HLA Adventure" is listed on the HLA Adventure website below:
http://members.tripod.com/~panks/hlaadv.html
This means that:
1) "HLA Adventure" is free to distribute, modify, make derivative works thereof, and otherwise use.
2) "Mippy the Dragon" is also free to distribute, modify, make derivative works thereof, and otherwise use.
3) "HLA Adventure" and "Mippy the Dragon" are no longer Copyrighted works, as of June 12, 2004.
I, Paul Allen Panks, being the author ("The Author of HLA Adventure and Mippy the Dragon") hereby grant "HLA Adventure" and "Mippy the Dragon" into the collective works of the Public ("Public Domain").
Additionally, I, Paul Allen Panks, being the author ("The author of HLA Adventure and Mippy the Dragon") grant a royalty-free permission of distribution, modification, copying and otherwise use of "HLA Adventure" and "Mippy the Dragon". This includes all "HLA Adventure" source code, derivative works of "HLA Adventure", and any and all images or works relating to or derivative of "Mippy the Dragon".
Sincerely,
Paul Allen Panks
dunric@yahoo.com
ICQ# 12234336
Few cats act their age, while most just cough up fur balls.