[DGD] Solving a Persistence Problem - Puzzles and Quest Objects

[David Jackson]

At 02:19 PM 9/6/2004, you wrote:

>David Jackson wrote:
>
>>In working with the Gurba lib, I've made a secondary goal to port over 
>>some of the classic adventure games, specifically the MIT Zork (Dungeon) 
>>and Colossal Cave.  In planning these ports, I realized a few of the 
>>biggest problems in converting what is essentially a single-player game 
>>to a multi-player platform.
>
>Just as an aside: I did a port of the early 'zmachine' to LPC about ten 
>years ago. I did get it to basically work, but as I recall it was less 
>than entirely satisfying because there was no clean mapping of their 
>objects to LPC objects... or rather, there was, but some instructions of 
>theirs ignored the OO abstraction layer and did direct memory writes or 
>register writes or somesuch. I don't remember precisely.
>
>I got the feeling at the time that their system had started out very clean 
>and as the pressures of writing actual games grew they took some shortcuts 
>with the design of their language. But that's just guesswork.
>
>Zell

I love you guys.  You have some of the same passions as I do. :)

What I have essentially done (so far), is to use a Z-code decompiler, and 
then use a number of dumping tools (from the Ztools set) to get the 
information into a file, which is essentially source code for the Inform 
language.  Now, I have to write a file parser for pulling the room 
descriptions and exits out, which is all that I believe that I can 
accomplish; individual objects will still have to be coded by hand.  Then, 
I can write another parser for turning that data into clean LPC rooms.

It's still better than nothing (or, at least, better than typing in all of 
the room descriptions and exits by hand).  And the parsers should be 
relatively easy.

Is anyone interested in seeing this decompiled data?  Short of some errors, 
I believe I have it for Zork I, II, and III, and will soon have it for 
every game in the series.

David Jackson


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