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.

Comments

Hmmmm.....horrible flashbacks

[schild]

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.

Why?

[News for nerds]

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.

Re:Why?

[Maggot75]

It seems that this question goes wholly unanswered. The only specific mention of HLA is:

HLA stands for High Level Assembly, and it's a great way for people to learn assembly without being submerged off the bat in offsets, memory locations and MOV instructions.

There is nothing on the website that explains why the author didn't choose a scripting language instead - my guess is that the author simply didn't think of a better way, and is obsessed with writing in assembly, for speed of execution.

Re:Why?

[LWATCDR]

There are a few reasons not to write a text adventure in Lisp/Perl/ML/Some Basics/Python/scheme/or java.
One is the runtime. Not everyone that might want to run you game will have Perl/Lisp.... installed on there system. Sometimes it is really nice to just download an EXE file. The issue with that is you never know what the exe file REALLY does and it will only work under one system. Of course you could run it with dosemu under linux if you wanted to.
For this guy I guess he WANTED to write in in HLA. I guess that is a good enough reason.

in case you're having trouble finding the story

[kwoff]

(not that you're looking for the story, as this is Slashdot)

You are in a twisty maze of an e-zine web page. Before you is a banner ad. To the south are two magazine ads.
> scroll down
You are between two magazine ads. To the east are Google ads.
> scroll down
You found a title!
> read
Before you is a summary.
> scroll down
Look out, a large box ad is lurking nearby!
> read
The page has refreshed!
> read
You found more Google ads.
> scroll down
You found information on the author.
> scroll down
You are being chased by ads disguised as links!
> scroll down quickly
Didn't understand command modifier "quickly".
> scroll down
You were eaten by a big orange footer ad.
Start over [Y/n]?

Re:What a name!

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the source file the author is Paul Panks, aka PAP. "Bug-fixed by: Frank Kotler, Randy Hyde, many others..."

You should give the source a read. The turf wars in it are hilarious. Some choice excerpts:

// Sorry Frank, had to add in all the stuff.
// "Horrible kludge!" :) /PAP

// Frank, lay off the yellow pills... :) /PAP

stdout.puts("Fixed by Frank Kotler" nl nl);

// YIPES! Every time through the loop?
// I know, I know. Parse is the loop from hell. :) /PAP

// Frank's debugging code. Please leave in place. /PAP

Re:Wrong

[Tom7]

Why do any of us care how he went about doing this? It's fine for him to have fun doing it, but if that's all this is about, then it doesn't warrant a slashdot story. If it's actually interesting enough to deserve a story (which I don't think it is), then the story should at least have the tone of "look at this crazy thing that someone did!" instead of "HLA is a useful and increasingly popular language for developing applications, such as adventure games." The latter is essentially the tone of the article and the slashdot story.

Slashdot is glorifying a backwards practice, and I believe that is damaging to the naive budding programmers that read it, and damaging to the people that end up using their programs. Expressing my opposition to this is not ridiculous--if you have counter arguments to my actual claim, let's have a discussion.

Why I chose HLA

[dunric]

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