BEST text adventure maker to use to REMAKE a game....

Games written in Inform, Glulx, TADS, CAT, HUGO and similar. Pleas for help, puzzles, bug reports etc.

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billy7720
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Location: United States

BEST text adventure maker to use to REMAKE a game....

#1 Post by billy7720 » Fri Apr 01, 2011 4:09 pm

I am currently in the works to redo "Crystal Caverns" by Dan Kitchen from Hayden Software. Currently I am using the original software Mr. Kitchen used from Hayden called "The Computer Novel Construction Set" as it seems right to use the same creator he used.

Any other ideas? I don't want to sit for 6 months learning a new piece of coding software. This was the first game I ever played on the Apple //e computer from 1983 and I miss it. I can never understand why the game never made the IBM PC format so I'm doing it from scratch.

I have currently 20 rooms' (out of 110) descriptions that I must input through CNCS and it will be a cakewalk, but wondered if there is an easier or more diverse program to use?

Is there an editor that includes nouns, verbs, adjectives and the like? I find that CNCS only uses a very limited parser via verbs and items but it will suffice. Any other ideas?

All posts are appreciated. I currently have "Inform" and it seems straight forward enough. Any other recommendations? Thanks for your time.

billy7720

dave
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Joined: Tue Aug 21, 2007 10:20 pm

Re: BEST text adventure maker to use to REMAKE a game....

#2 Post by dave » Fri Apr 01, 2011 11:07 pm

I'm always interested in getting old adventure systems working on modern machines (and have done work on GAC, The Quill, Adventurescape and BAPS). The CNCS was one of the ones on my list to look at when I have time (and the interest), I even got as far as downloading a version and having a quick mess around with it.

I can try and write an interpreter for CNCS, but as I currently have a young child; my better half tells me off for spending too much time on the computer, which does mean I can't make any guarantee when I will get one out.

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catventure
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Re: BEST text adventure maker to use to REMAKE a game....

#3 Post by catventure » Sat Apr 02, 2011 6:33 pm

billy7720 wrote:Any other ideas?

Is there an editor that includes nouns, verbs, adjectives and the like? I find that CNCS only uses a very limited parser via verbs and items but it will suffice. Any other ideas?

All posts are appreciated. I currently have "Inform" and it seems straight forward enough. Any other recommendations? Thanks for your time.

billy7720
Hi Billy7720,

Have you tried QUEST or ADRIFT?
Also there is my own PAW/Quill replicant for Windows which has a vocabulary editor for the various words etc. More here:
http://ifwiki.org/index.php/ThinBASIC_Adventure_Builder

Cheers,
catventure.
TAB is an offline, downloadable, parser-based retro text adventure/interactive creator for Windows XP and above.
It is similar to popular 80's adventure creators like QUILL, PAW, STAC or GAC.
http://tab.thinbasic.com/

billy7720
Posts: 17
Joined: Tue Mar 29, 2011 12:04 am
Location: United States

Re: BEST text adventure maker to use to REMAKE a game....

#4 Post by billy7720 » Mon Apr 04, 2011 3:23 pm

Yeppers! Just found ADRIFT and am working on Crystal Caverns right now! :)

Hope to have this one done soon too; currently playing the game using Apple // WIN and typing all the commands, locations, items and etc to a text editor on the same screen. ;)

LOVE this old game. Just posted about this in another post.

Thanks guys!!!

Alastair
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Re: BEST text adventure maker to use to REMAKE a game....

#5 Post by Alastair » Mon Apr 04, 2011 5:52 pm

billy7720 wrote:Hope to have this one done soon too; currently playing the game using Apple // WIN and typing all the commands, locations, items and etc to a text editor on the same screen. ;)
Would Ciderpress http://ciderpress.sourceforge.net/ be of any help here? It may allow you to copy and paste the text rather than you having to retype everything.

billy7720
Posts: 17
Joined: Tue Mar 29, 2011 12:04 am
Location: United States

Re: BEST text adventure maker to use to REMAKE a game....

#6 Post by billy7720 » Sat Apr 09, 2011 2:04 am

Alastair wrote:
billy7720 wrote:Hope to have this one done soon too; currently playing the game using Apple // WIN and typing all the commands, locations, items and etc to a text editor on the same screen. ;)
Would Ciderpress http://ciderpress.sourceforge.net/ be of any help here? It may allow you to copy and paste the text rather than you having to retype everything.
Thanks! Very interesting program here and I gave it a whirl. Unforunately it only shows some of the descriptions and none of the directions from room to room. Nonetheless, it's an amazing hex decimal editor! Thank you for this information.

billy7720

dave
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Joined: Tue Aug 21, 2007 10:20 pm

Re: BEST text adventure maker to use to REMAKE a game....

#7 Post by dave » Sat Apr 09, 2011 8:05 am

Having has a quick looks at the C64 version (it was quicker to find). Most of the data is in two files: CC64 and DES1.

DES1 looks to be the messages file (presumably to be read from disk, as the disk is larger than the C64's memory), with each message being in a block of 0x120 bytes, most of which consist of 0x00; then there are a load of integers and the message in ASCII.

CC64 is more interesting and seems to hold the real data, certainly words start at 0x5140, separated by a 0xc0. The start of the file looks like 6502 machine code; as for the rest - this would require more than a quick look. I'm seeing a lot of top bit characters in the body of file which may be interesting.

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