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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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
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
But your answers were not very satisfying for me, neither X11 nor wxWindows is Linux specific. (wxWindows even runs on Win32).
Ok.
I've downloaded the sources and all I can tell now: There's nothing that qualifies it as "Linux" version, so talking of a new "linux port" is very missleading IMHO. On Unix systems you now have the choice of a command-line only, a Glk (if this library/toolkit is available for Unix...) or a wxWindows versions. That's it.
I'm currently trying to build wxWindows/gtk (for hewx) on my machine. But after ages of compiling I had to see that it doesn't like gtk-1.2.4 I have on my system :-(. So I've install gtk-1.0.6 as well and started over.
But then I noticed that hewx needs wx/caret.h wich wxWindows 2.01 (the latest stable release) doesn't have. }:-( - Argh! (The BUILD file of hewx tells you that it was developed with wxWindows 2.1 snapshot 8).
Since I'm too lazy and tired now to get a newer developement snapshot of wxWindows and (try to) compile it a third time (it really needs a lot of cycles!) I give up for today...
I really hope that my time was not completely wasted and this keeps other people from falling into the same pitfalls like me:-)
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
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
The UNIX version, as far as I know, was a text only console engine. The Hugo platform also allows for optional graphics, sounds, and mouse interation, and these are now available in the new Linux version which runs in X11.
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
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."
It is not designed to be inherently multiuser. However, if the player is also treated as an object (like all the "other characters" are), then it should be fairly trivial to add multiplayer code. It depends on how elegantly coded it is. If everything about the player is object-oriented (interface, location, posessions, etc.), then it would only require adding more players and a way to interface with it.
The main problem with making it multiplayer is the possibility for graphics. If it's in text-only mode, though, then it could be connected to with a simple telnet (as MUDs generally are).
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