Thank you to those who sat through my presentation on Saturday.
I’m excited to present this intiative, as I believe it will unite our machines in a unique and very interesting way, creating interest across the society from machine renovation to ancient coding.
I’d like to open several topics here to explore specific tasks for the game’s development. We need Python programmers, game creatives, hardware hackers, and native machine programmers.
Keep your eyes open, and I’ll post specific stuff elsewhere.
So, the interesting thing about Inform, is that it can actually compile 16-bit executables for the Z-machine of 1979. This was the same VM used to run Zork. So, in essence, what I’m saying is that we could write stories on our laptops and compile them down to run even on a PDP-11.
Now, the only challenge here is neither the Z-machine nor the Inform language support MUD type games per se, with multiplayer. We would either need to hack on the VM which sounds hard, or I might proceed with this somewhat independently as an experiment. But I thought I’d mention this here because it seems tangentially related. Let me know what you think.
Mel, there is much work to be done to develop the MUD content. I’m not sure if this system can help with that. Perhaps it can compile into something we can process into the MUD game.
I’m working on a macro-language now that allows us to describe the game content with a very simple syntax, and that gets compiled into resources that can be imported into the game.
The idea is a MUD-style game that can be played meuseum-wide on our vintage machines. Simple machines like a TTY can play, as well as more sophisticated machines. SImple machines might be given priviledged roles in the game to make them artifically important. The game may issue a challenge that can be played differently on different machies. With apologies to those who have heard me pitch this, a TTY might play a Lunar Lander type game, turn by turn, to land a spaceship on a planet. The same task may be playted on a VT100 with some crude animation. On a C64, you’d fly the ship down. On a graphical workstation, we could do 3D graphics and rich sound. Same task as far as the game is concerned.
We would develop adapters (likely raspberry pi or other microcontoller projects) that enable telnet communications from our vintage machines (or other hard/soft protocols).