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Hugo Engine and Guilty Bastards for Linux
Kent Tessman writes "I've released a Linux port of Hugo (an adventure game creation system for BeOS, DOS, Win32, Amiga, Acorn, Macintosh, OS/2, and Unix in general) The major Hugo release so far is Guilty Bastards, a tongue-in-cheek Los Angeles detective story. Screenshots and more information are also available Both Hugo and Guilty Bastards are free--I hope people have fun with them. " Actually looks surprisingly interesting.
Go to ftp.gmd.de into the if-archive directory. There are a lot of high quality text adventures made by fans of the genre. My personal favourites are: Jigsaw and Curses both by Graham Nelson and Web (I think thats the name) by Andrew Plotkin.
I really like slashdot. It's a great site for reading news about stuff that I'm interested in. Every now and then, though, I run across a meaningless story like this one. These stories belong on freshmeat. Slashdot is "News for Nerds," not new applications for nerds. Guys, stick to what you're good at, and let scoop do what he's good at.
--
.-.--
Umm... OK, so there is no support for 3D sound, or weird input devices. But we have 2D covered (X or ggi), 3D (OpenGL), sound (OSS or ALSA)... What more is needed? Sure, a lot of hardware isn't supported, but that isn't due to lack of APIs, but lack of support from hardware vendors.
Well, since this thread is about Hugo, a program for writing Interactive Fiction (text adventures, to the rest of you), I don't think you can get too far from the CLI. Of course, Hugo (as well as TADS and Inform, it's competitors) allows both graphics and sound, so a gui is nice too. Maybe it's time to compromise?
Can you say Sierra Interactive? The King's Quest games were basically IF with graphics and mousing. So another comment was right: This is about the place DOS games were in the 1980's.
I thought there was a Half-Life player client for Linux already? There sure are plenty of Linux *servers* for HL and Team Fortress Classic...
java is getting much better. more support for java, means less having to run windows, which means more reason to check out linux. so like yeah, port it to java, and indirectly support linux at the same time.
I tried that too. The wxGTK-devel-2.1.0-9 RPM was missing an include file (wx/gtk/setup.h), so I built wxGTK from scratch, which worked. It still didn't copy that include file when I did 'make install', so I copied it by hand.
Then I build hewx and, while it did build successfully, it was messed up enough to render it unplayable. On the normal game screen I couldn't see any of the text output. If I went to 'show scrollback window', I could see the game output, but then I couldn't type.
Oh well.
Same here (a segfault). Although the BUILD file for hewx in the source distribution says that "wxHugo was developed with wxWindows 2.1 snapshot 8 and later" it only seems to work with snapshot 8, not 9!
I got it from here. Brilliant game, BTW!
If it was ported to java and not lots and lots of different platforms.. it could run on lots and lots of different platforms.. with not all the hard work of porting it all over the place.. wouldnt that make more since? The newish Java3D API will take care of using GL or Direct3D for you, so whatever you have it will suport. .i gues the only argumetn is slowness. .and i think thats up their on the list now that java is fairly stable and many of the other problesm (poor GUI, etc..) have been dealt with. xjamundx
Amazing... why do you feel that in order to be interesting a game must have lots of graphics and sound, and such. While there's nothing inherently wrong with either, it's quite rare to see a game that really takes advantage of them.
Myst is probably the best, and it's nothing more than a glorified text game.
And much as I like Marathon, first person shooters have a lot more to do with reflexes than anything else. Slapjack is not wholly dissimilar. (and id games are really ugly anyway... so much brown...)
I'm a big fan of text games. I played most of the old Infocom games on an Apple II in their hayday. And there are still a *lot* of really good ones out there. Of course, it's not usually listed in the system requirements, but you need to have a functional IMAGINATION. When you 'look' you have to use your brain to interpret the flavor text. But, as it happens, the imagination is very good at this sort of thing, if you've got one. The scariest picture in the world can't come close to what really scares you. 'You see a shady glen.' tells me a great deal with a mere 20-odd bytes. Maybe there are birches. I like them, so there are. I'm not reliant on what some other guy thinks it looks like.
While pretty much any computer nowadays can put up 3d spaceships and a midi soundtrack (hell, I played flight sims on a Mac Plus many moons ago) this does not always mean that a good game requires 3d spaceships and midi. Or whatever.
Text games are more or less the heart of computer games. They create a story and a setting with a minimum of cruft. At the heart of any good game (barring cards, or number games, or basic things like that) is going to be some kind of story. Multimedia just narrows down the possibilities that the story might contain to the narrow few that the author envisioned. It leaves little room for interpretation. It doesn't really let you make the story _your_own_.
I haven't played this particular game, but it might easily be a jillion times better than the best game on Dreamcast or Windows. Try to imagine it, but maybe it'll be a jillion times better because it gets you involved and isn't just eye candy. Crappy games are going to be crappy no matter how sparkly they are. Good games are going to be good even if they're 7bit ASCII text and require you to invest in a good stock of graph paper.
I suggest that you try it. If you let yourself, you might even like it....
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
>And finally... I can't believe I'm the first person in this forum to even mention this. What has happened to /.? -sigh-
Well, all the folks that started with overclocking their Voodoo cards to get an extra 0.3 fps in classic Quake later graduated to spending that excess energy reading the minutae of software licenses and expounding endlessly about them on Slashdot, while blindly moderating up anything posted by Bruce Perens or Alan Cox.
Recently, most of those have also moved on again to being specialists in evolution theory and theology, although there is still a healthy population of Slashdotters who remain in the original two categories, some of which have made a sideways move into the exciting hobby of finding new ways to misspell "Windows" and "Microsoft."
That's about what's happened to Slashdot while _I've_ been around....
--
But do you really want your mother playing Quake, and possibly getting fragged by her? ...when you're supposed to be doing your homework? Heh. :)
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
The most well-known of these is Inform, a language written to produce bytecode for the Z-Machine, which is the virtual machine that Infocom used for their classic adventures. So, if there's a z-code interpreter available for your machine (which there almost certainly is), you can play all of the old Infocom games and most of the new Interactive Fiction games with it. Inform has some bitmap graphics capability, but few games use it -- most of the ones that do were written by Infocom (Zork Zero, Shogun, Arthur, and Journey).
There's also TADS, the Text Adventure Development System, which is somewhat similar to Inform but not as well known. This might be because it used to be shareware. TADS interpreters are also available on a wide range of systems, but not all of the interpreters handle all of the fancy new TADS features, like styled text, sound, and graphics. HUGO, the system mentioned here, is generally thought of as the third of the big three IF languages -- it's not quite as popular and not quite as ported. It's still a good language, though, and it's great to finally see a Linux port of the environment.
XFree 4.0 will have the direct rendering infrastructure. This will allow hw-accelerated windowed and full screen OpenGL (Mesa actually, but hey...) for any card with drivers ( TNT, matrox and 3dfx are likely to be in at the start) /across the network/, running the program on one machine, and using the hw accleration on the computer you're displaying on.
/is/ very fast, very easy to program for, /not/ slow.
The GLX code in the new release will also allow network-transparent OpenGL - i.e. you can run hardware-accelerated OpenGL programs
OpenGL is an excellent 2D and 3D graphics api, much better than directx. (yes, though most people hear of opengl for 3D, it's fine at 2D too...)
OpenGL
There is also the persistent myth that X is slow.
- well, across a network it wouldn't be fast, but X has had shared memory extensions for years for accelerating local clients, and DGA for fullscreen 2D rendering. It's
q3test for linux is already running great on my voodoo banshee, thanks to Daryll Strauss' efforts (glide.xxedgexx.com) It uses the Mesa OpenGL api running on top of the linux glide port.
check out www,precisioninsight.com and www.xfree86.org
More worrying is sound... perhaps ALSA will result in better sound support. I still miss AHI on the amiga. but then again, the amiga was near-realtime ( by sacrificing such luxuries as memory protection...d'oh!), so latency problems were much smaller.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
I got a Mac, I got the Mac version of HUGO and the other systems version of Guilty Bastards but it doesn't seem to work. Anyone wanna tell me how to run it?
and, according to the site, uses wxWindows as the graphics toolkit.
Well, since this thread is about Hugo, a program
for writing Interactive Fiction (text adventures,
to the rest of you), I don't think you can get too
far from the CLI. Of course, Hugo (as well as
TADS and Inform, it's competitors) allows both
graphics and sound, so a gui is nice too. Maybe
it's time to compromise?
The use of the Hugo library files and the distribution of the
Hugo Engine are authorized so long as all transactions are
non-commercial and free of charge (except in cases where any
charge is to cover the cost of distribution), and that the
library files and engine are not distributed in a modified
form.
Innocent1 (Dalnet Irc, #Linux)
Second, I think s/he who writes the software can choose whatever license s/he wants.
But I'm just trying to understand this license. It's at best contradictory. From http://www. ifarchive.org/if-archive/programming/hugo/manuals/ manual.txt:
I.a. Legal Notes
The use of the Hugo library files and the distribution of the Hugo Engine are authorized so long as all transactions are non-commercial and free of charge (except in cases where any charge is to cover the cost of distribution), and that the library files and engine are not distributed in a modified form.
So, no distribution of modified versions, which means non-[libre-]free. But then there's section I.b., which says:
I.b. (Less Legal Notes)
The source to the Hugo Library, of course, cannot be distributed in modified form unless it is expressly indicated that it was a.) written by Kent Tessman, and b.) subsequently modified and distributed by someone else.
First, that "of course" is just a bit silly, given the huge amount of truly open source software in the world today, including the Linux kernel itself. But regardless, these two statements are contradictory. A clarification needs to be made.
And finally... I can't believe I'm the first person in this forum to even mention this. What has happened to /.? -sigh-
Flames to /dev/null.
Except I got a different error:
hewx: error in loading shared libraries: hewx: undefined symbol: _9wxAppBase.m_appInitFn
But then, I'm on Debian (Potato). Maybe there's some kind of library version incompatibility here. I dunno.
I don't know, it's not just the language object model that needs to be made multiple-Player-Character aware, it's the library. I don't know enough about Hugo's library to comment accurately, but I expect it's (like most of Hugo) sort of like Inform and TADS, only cleaned up. And that would require more than just a simple bodge because the library contains a lot of game logic, and game logic is wildly different when there is more than one PC, especially on massively-multiple-PC MU** systems.
I guess the reason for the difference is that a single-PC game is telling a story and knows a lot about what has happened so far; it can provide very specific responses which may aspire to being actual literature and that. Whereas a multi-PC game has far more possible states and cannot hope to give the same sort of response as single-player IF; its reponses are by necessity much more formulaic, and less suitable for story-telling.
The exception, perhaps, is games that don't attempt to tell a story; simple collections of puzzles like the original Zork, Colossal Cave and so on. But it is still extremely difficult to design puzzles that can equally be solved by a single player or multiple concurrent players.
So what I'm saying, I think, is that single-player IF is a sufficiently different beastie from MUD-style to make a common framework system for both not especially useful. And I don't think it's possible to design a satisfying text game that can work equally as a single- or multiple-PC experience.
Unless anyone wants to prove me wrong...
--
Exactly what I thought as first.. Damn, those were the good old days, eh?....
Went there in Windows, using IE 5.0, and all I get is a dead applet that's spewed out a java.lang.nullpointer exception.
(Yeah, yeah, so I was in Windows. I only use my Windows partition for games and DVD's. And I just finished watching Tron, to myeahh)
Just curious, but did you get this? I know for awhile, Lost Treasures of Infocom I and II were in their catalog online, but they'd sold out of stock a year or two ago. And between those two collections, you had EVERY SINGLE Infocom game. More than the Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces.
SIgh
"Both Hugo and Guilty Bastards are free--I hope people have fun with them."
I think that the story only made slashdot cause it got ported.
You mean that the story only made it because it got ported to Linux. I submited a story about an announcement by Be Inc. that Shogo: Mobile Armor Division was being ported to BeOS. The port is even being done by the same company who makes the windows version. I figured this was a major step for the game industry because it showed a game company (Other than Id) that is going to make it's game for windows and an alternate OS in house instead of outsourcing it. But since the game was being ported to BeOS, and not to Linux, it wasn't good enought to be Slashdot material...
PS: This will probably be moderated down as a Flamebait
Instead, it's just the way things are. Don't look for reports of cattle futures or immigration stats on Slashdot, either. Nature of the beast.
.pl interface that strips all evidence of moderation from this site, want it?
PS, I have a
The guy above makes a valid point about how Linux is lacking, and is moderated down to zero. The next guy says no, no, everything is rosy, shoehorns in a couple of acronyms, and is moderated up to two and labelled "insightful." "Sad, sad, sad, George and Martha."
>EVERY SINGLE Infocom game
Not entirely true...
There were a few non-IF games out of Infocom (some came out after Activision absorbed Infocom) that are not on the LTOI collections. "Frobiscky" (sp) was a multi-player party quiz game. "Quarterstaff: Tomb of Setmoth" was a graphical RPG for the Mac (I'd still give an arm for a copy of it.) And a Battletech game ("Cresent Hawk's Inception", I think) that was an overhead, turn-based RPG-like adventure game. I'm not mentioning Cornerstone or the dreadful InfoComics, but neither really qualifies as a "treasure" anyway.
As a side note, the ads for Quarterstaff, my experience playing Cresent Hawk's Inception, and reading a description of Larn for the Amiga all led me to write what I now recognize as a Rouge-like for the Commodore 64 called "Orn", but by the time I got done with it, I was off of Q-Link and didn't think anyone on the Internet would want it.
Towards the end of my C-64 days, I was spending a ton of time playing games from an IF-creation system that had been ported from Apple II, but I can't remember the name of it. The cool thing was that you could carry your character over from game to game. The bad thing was the parser sucked (verb/noun only). Ah, the good ol' days!
It's in
ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/incoming/hugov25_wxwin _linux.tar.gz
and will migrate to /if-archive/programming/hugo/executables/.
The reason for doing this in the first place (a Linux binary release) was to incorporate the fixed MikMod library (since a couple of important things are broken in the current release).
Sorry for any inconvenience.
--Kent Tessman
I've used Hugo in the past and it's a great system. Glad to see it finally has a good Linux port.
Mycroft-X
Hugo is a nice system, great with a Linux port. I haven't actually played a Hugo system but I've studied it from a MUD coder's perspective and it has a lot of nice features. (Cool parsing, for instance.)
If there's already a "Unix version" where's the difference to the Linux version? Isn't Linux "Unix" enough for a unified Unix port? I really doubt that there are special Linux features that make sense to support for this kind of application.
Sorry that I'm too lazy to download the different sources and make a comparison on my own :-)
BTW: It's really cool that there's an Acorn port. Long live RISC OS! Reminds me of mame where sometimes the Acorn port was more uptodate than the Windows one.
This really looks like cool stuff, and a neat project.
'Course, as anyone else who only uses Windows for games, anything that advances gaming on Linux is a very Good Thing (tm).
I can't help but think a lot of people could use this to create some really amazing and fun things.
Topher
I hope the amount of linux games and gaming systems continue to flourish. The more games linux has, the more attractive and legitimate the average user will see it. This will encourage more people to buy and support linux software which will fund future development of more games, device drivers, and other projects. Round out the personal apps in development with games and linux can be a legitimate contender to MS at home.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
Nethack is loads of fun. However, the best has got to be ADOM. It has many of the familiar "Rogue-like" game qualities, but feels more like a pencil-and-paper RPG than any of the others (IMHO)- there are multiple dungeons, quests, etc. I have lost far more hours than I care to admit trying to beat that game...
-jacob
more games to fuel my crazed mind. I suppose this will make it easier for me to pull more from the ms ranks and make them join the resisitance. Viva!!
char *stupidsig = "this is my dumb sig";
is it like a mud? could it be set up that way? that would rule, playing somthing like LOD on it.
this space unintentionally left blank
Our software development takes place across a broad spectrum of computer platforms, helped by the highly valued contributions of talented individuals around the world.
You can use our software on a wide variety of computer systems, including such leading-edge platforms as BeOS and Linux. Other supported operating systems range from Unix-powered workstations to Macintosh, Amiga to Acorn/RISC OS to OS/2, and even a couple you might have heard of from a company called Microsoft.
I think they have the right atitude; they support as much as they can. They also support the open-source community. By supporting an enourmous number of platforms and involving outside developers this company seems to be doing well.
I think we will see more companies use this type of model as more alternative OSs become popular.
More platforms + more developers = better code and more users.
-Davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
A good place to hang around if you're into IF are rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction.
STD disclaimer: yes, my English is crap. But surely you can make something out of it...
Guikachu: Resource editor for PalmOS developers
I got into the whole BBS just as it was on the way out so I didn't get a chance to piss away 1000's of hours playing telnet adventures. The fact that I started out on the dark side of the OS world also made me think that text was boring. Since those early, misled days I have learned to love using a text interface, though using the web with lynx still isn't nearly as fun as with netscape... Anyways, for the past few months I have been searching for some cool text based adventure games that I could play locally (no multi-player necessary to make this kid happy). I want(ed) some games that use very little resources so that I that I have something to do while I'm waiting for something to compile. I have a fairly fast machine but I just don't want to have X sucking up any of my resources while I'm compiling something. I'm not creative enough to design a game in Hugo, but I can't wait to play some... In my search I came across adventure++ which looks like Hugo's old grandpa. Also, I found nethack, but have been unsuccessful at compiling it... Nethack sounds like exactally what I'm looking for, a text based local adventure game. I can't wait until somebody manages to build a little tetris game into vim...
I installed wxGTK-2.1.0-9.i386.rpm, downloaded hugov25_wxwin_linux.tar.gz, ran ./hewx, and got:
./hewx: Symbol `__vt_14wxImageHandler' has different size in shared object, consider re-linking
./hewx: Symbol `__vt_13wxJPEGHandler' has different size in shared object, consider re-linking
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
Advance Linux Sound Architecture, sorry, no. So are they giving the finger to all other free unices?
Anyways, what about syncing sound and graphics? So what we need is a cross-platform library that can sync multimedia events.
DGA solves most of the basic "Make the GUI go away and give me 2D graphics with non-jittery pointer stuff" problems which were a complete pain just two or three years ago (remember crashes in SVGAlib Doom!)
OpenGL solves all your 3D niceness (yes, even extensions, though some stuff like the T-buffer may be too gimmicky for OGL)
The sound stuff is a bit of a mess, I admit, and while the OSS APIs were OK in an era when DOS games rolled their own DMA code I look forward to seeing something better from future Linux dists, perhaps ALSA?
Aside from the inevitable "Huh?" questions you get on any new platform, porting to Linux looks pretty OK to me. 90% of publishers just don't give a damn (they often feel the same way about NT) and that's fine, but don't blame their financial decisions on Linux.
Nick.
From what I've gathered by following the alsa-dev mailing list, they've gotten latencies down to arround 2ms max using Ingo's patch (sched? timer? can't remember the details of what it's for) and some optimisations in alsa itself. Most of their work seems to be currently concentrated on midi timers, but I beleive they were also discussing sound samples/effects as well. Alsa and Linux are gaining (soft?) real time capabilities and are slowly making RTLinux needed only for true hard RT applications and BeOS less relevant (not meant as a troll, but when Linux and BeOS get similar multimedia performance, BeOS loses it's standing as `the multimedia os' and becomes required only by BeOS enthusiasts (more power to them, viva la diference)).
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Hugo's house of Horrors?
Microsoft's new DirectJizz API lets you post irrelevant, insulting, infuriating comments to Slashdot stories faster than ever before. Highly recommended. Sadly, there is no DirectJizz API for Linux.
In the current climate of Java Virtual Machines why don't they just port it to Java and to hell with all this "we support Motorola 6502 version".
The Annual Interactive Fiction Competition is now in its 5th year and each year there are more entries with 90% of them being either TADS or INFORM/Z-code, all Linux friendly formats. Too late to enter this year but the contest starts the 30th. See you there, with my crappy games. I'm rybread. www.ifarchive.org has gigs of interactive fiction stuff. Here, to get you started, last years Inform entries! Acid.z5 is mine. It's a big in-joke.
when Push Comes to Shove
Wait, Win95 has a "broad selection of industry recognized multimedia standards"? I see OpenGL and DirectX being the only ones used today. Not exactly a broad selection. And DC has WinCE and Sega's proprietary thing, so no broad selection there, either.
Developers don't want a broad selection of standards, they want one standard, so they only have to support one driver. If the Linux world wants to see more games, then it needs one good API for graphics, and one good API for sound (how about Alsa?). In particular, fast graphics in X is a requirement.
Of course, the thing that will really draw the game companies is more users. Without users, APIs are useless. X needs to be really easy to setup for a wide variety of graphics cards and monitors before there will be more users. The basic Linux install has gotten quite easy, but the X configuration still needs work.
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I know this was a flamebait but, to tell the truth, you are basically correct. Currently, Linux lacks any widespread standard for creating high performance games.This situation reminds me of early 1990s on Windows 3.11 and DOS. There were nice games back then but every game company had their own way of doing things which resulted in terrible headache for the customers ( dozens of different autoexec.bat files etc..)
It has to change and it has to be done at the OS level ( possible XFree 4.0 will bring some sort of solution, don't know much about that yet - will see)
For those who are interested in IF (Interactive Fiction) Engines, you might want to take a look at the COG Engine, a Java-Based, GPL'd Online Gaming Engine that will let you play your games via the web, through netscape:
http://cogengine.linuxbox.com
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
No, we need more games that are multi-platform. Imagine, an online game, lets say Quake2, ported over to *every* OS, it would be a wonderful thing Im sure. Everybody and their mother could play it, thats GREAT! As its going, I really hope to see more stuff like this come out in the future. Hell, Quake3 and Descent2 are being ported to BeOS, least I got THAT going for me. Judg3
*******
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
It's nice to see that I can still buy the Zork set (for $15!), and I'm sure with a little twiddling the Z-code could be run on Your Favorite Platform... (I ordered the Infocom Masterpieces from here. Search for Infocom on http://store.activision.com/ if the link is broken)
o/~ Join us now and share the software
I know this may be blasphemy, dunno, (or flamebait? I hope not), but I remember one of the first games I really loved (besides the el-cheeso games I played on my Tandy) was Oregon Trail, runnin' off a good ol' 5 1/4 disk. (woo hoo!)
I _know_ you guys remember that game. For some reason, I just thought it was cool.. I'd play that thing for hours. (ok, not _that_ long, but..)
just browsing through the recesses of my mind...
Insert mind here.
One thing to point out is that IF games typically are not open source... perhaps because there isn't the demand because the games are often only written by one person and the source code would give the game's solution away :)
I suppose there would be a lot of reusable code and good working examples of how to implement puzzles, though...
I LOVED the zork trilogy. I never got to the end of Hitchhiker's though.
Nice to see this type of game hasn't died.....
PS I play half-life also, and am waiting for the Linux port!
Looking at a review for "Oregon Trail" which the 25th anniversary edition is selling for $70, it hit me that using Hugo or something similiar would be an excellent application for free educational software that will run on the old warhorse machines under Linux.6 12.html
http://www.currents.net/magazine/texas/612/gmrv
http://new.shoptlc.com/corpproduct.asp?corp=1
--- Join my team at www.dcypher.net $10,000 to the winning computer #147 "Homebuilt Computer Users"
I'm talking about standarrds that are so solid that it takes reinventing the wheel out of game development. DX does this.
That's exactly what I said: "one good API for graphics". DirectX is an API. Linux and X don't have a good, fast, standard API, AFAIK. That's what it needs.
Does anyone know what development is going on in this area?
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If anyone is interrested in interactive fiction I can recommend the online fanzine xyzzy news http://www.xyzzynews.com/
And to those complaining of the lack of graphics and 3D, I suppose you never read books either! To paraphrase an old quote,"Interactive Fiction has the best graphics in the world, your own imagination."
You know what .. I think it will be easier for game companies to port games to BeOS than , say Linux. At least BeOS has a nice clean API one can code to and be reasonable sure that his code will run using all the hardware support available on given machine.