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.

Comments

Re:They have the right idea

[Nat Lanza]

It's not just them -- pretty much all of the Interactive Fiction community cares a lot about cross-platform compatibility. It may be a small community, but the people in it use a freakishly large range of systems. Because of this, most of the IF developments systems use specialized languages that compile to platform-independent bytecode.

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.

How Free?

[Anonymous Coward]

First, I'm very glad to see this, and will probably try it out.

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.

They have the right idea

[davidu]

This is direct from their web site:

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

Re:In search of "The Game"

[Cactus]

What you describe are IF (Interactive Fiction) games, and a big bunch of those use the Infocom ZipCode-format, which is a virtual machine that runs byte-coded games, and is therefore of course platform independent (can you say Java made in the 80's?). There are plenty of ZipCode interpreters for Unixen, the two most widely used are Frotz and XZip (sorry, no URLs this time, but there are nice Debian packages for both of them, look around at your local Debian mirror). A huge archive of IF games can be found at the GMD IF archive (look for the files called .z{number}).

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...

ALSA and latency

[Bill Currie]

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)).

Annual Interactive Fiction Contest--Linux Friendly

[dayeight]

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.

Another GPL Interactive Fiction Engine

[Cycon]

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

Great to see some Interactive Fiction coverage.

[Torbj�rn]

Most people seem to assume that the text adventure died with Infocom, makers of such classic games as the "zork" series. But it has lived on and improved in secluded parts of the internet. On the way it changed it's name to Interactive Fiction, and now we have advanced systems such as Inform, TADS and Hugo. Games produced now by amateurs for free and with no compensation other than recognition among their peers (why does this seem familiar;-) ) are now approaching and in some cases even surpassing the old masters. I especially like playing these games on my Palm V. That way I can snuggle up with it in bed, like I would with a good book. Try doing that with Quake 3!

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."