• Zork
  
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
  
• Shade
  
• The Hulk
  
• Infidel
  
• Colossal Adventure
  

Play the adventures!

• A one-word action
  These are the commands like LOOK, JUMP, and SING which don't act on any objects.
  
  
• An action and a direct object
  These are the commands that act on something. For instance, TAKE THE BOOK. TAKE is the verb, and THE BOOK (or simply BOOK) is the object.
  
  
• An action, a direct object, and an indirect object
  These are the commands that act on two things. You give a verb, the direct object of the verb, and the indirect object. PUT THE TOAST IN THE TOASTER is an example: PUT is the verb, THE TOAST is the direct object, and THE TOASTER is the indirect object.
  
  
• An order to another character
  In many games you'll meet other people or animals, and sometimes you cal tell them to do things. You do that by saying their name, followed by the command you want to give them. For example, RONALD, GIVE ME THE FRIES.
  
  
• Communicating with another character
  Besides ordering characters around, you can communicate with them using commands like ASK RONALD ABOUT THE FRIES, TELL RONALD ABOUT THE MANAGER'S SPECIAL, and SHOW THE GREASY BURGER TO RONALD. Strictly speaking, these fall under the third category above, but they're specialized enough that I wanted to make them a separate category. (And in some newer games you can TALK TO characters, just so you know.)
  
  
• A special command
  These are the commands which do something outside of the game world, like AGAIN, which repeats the last command you did, SAVE, which saves your game, and RESTORE, which reloads a previously saved game.
  

• Larger text adventures weren't working because of the 200000 item limitation on lists so I've had to introduce a system of splitting large games across multiple lists
  
• Only a few adventures would fit into the project at first so I introduced a system by which adventures can be stored as graphical images and decoded within the game. This means the game can now hold hundreds of full adventures!
  
• Playing adventures without a load/save system can be soul destroying so I utilised my Save-Game Toolkit to allow adventures to be loaded and saved.
  
• Debugging has been painful to say the least!
  
• Adding an easy to use system that allows players to load and play their own z-code games.
  
• There's no way to detect the backspace key being pressed so I've had to use the “ask” block. As this takes up a different amount of space on a screen depending on resolution, full-screen or windowed, etc. I've had to allow the user to modify their playing area quickly and easily.
  

• Status bar for v3 games needs adding again now that I've updated the entire output system (as the limited system I had previously only seemed to fully support Infocom games)
  
• Text windows are not yet implemented so the text format is often questionable.
  
• Room titles are appearing underneath the text instead of at the top of the screen (which relates to the windows implementation mentioned above).
  
• Negative scores display as large positive ones.
  

• Text parsing doesn't seem to be working at all.
  

• Can't enter the password on the keyboard. It turns out that you need to enter the word in quotation marks. E.g. TYPE “ANSWER” ON KEYBOARD.
  

• Their bespoke load/save routines aren't working from the start menu. Though upon reading the instructions properly it seems you have to enter “save game” rather than just “save” on these particular adventures!
  
• An extra newline is being inserted after any command is entered that isn't understood.
  

• First line of text asking if instructions are required is hidden behind the status bar at the top.
  

• There's virtually no text appearing since the windowing system was added! I fixed the issue but discovered very occasional unsuitable use of language so removed the adventure from the project :(
  

• I have no idea what to do in this game. It understands very few instructions. This actually seems to be an issue with the game itself and not the interpreter!
  

• The game seems to work but displays a few lines of gibberish after every command! Internally there are some weird things going on. It seems that there are multiple threads running (though I'm 99% sure I've avoided that so I'm not sure how it's happening). For debugging purposes, __extended__ is the function where these issues start showing up…
  

• In-game help instructions take up the full screen and then don't release it afterwards. They also don't really show the instructions!
  

• The status bar at the top doesn't seem to update with new locations.
  

colinmacc wrote:

Minor bug report. There's a typo in the “Zork” intro text on the menu..

"The troll, who is remarkably coordinated, catches the brown sack and, hot having the most discriminating taste, gleefully eats it."

LOL I just had to check, and the typo is not in the game

cthuluroo wrote:

what is a z-code game?

RokCoder wrote:

The Dragon and the Troll

• I have no idea what to do in this game. It understands very few instructions. This actually seems to be an issue with the game itself and not the interpreter!
  

imfh wrote:

In the Adventure International games, text wrapping doesn't work correctly for the description at the top of the screen. Also, there is an extra newline whenever it doesn't understand something.

This is really neat! I like how you use images to store the data. I was trying something similar a while ago, but with multiple colors. It is definitely a lot faster when you use just 1 color.

RokCoder wrote:

imfh wrote:

In the Adventure International games, text wrapping doesn't work correctly for the description at the top of the screen. Also, there is an extra newline whenever it doesn't understand something.

This is really neat! I like how you use images to store the data. I was trying something similar a while ago, but with multiple colors. It is definitely a lot faster when you use just 1 color.

Thanks for the bug reports! I'm surprised I haven't received more of them - hopefully it's because there are less issues than I imagined there would be

I've found many interesting things about z-code whilst making this project. One is that when it splits text windows (as in the Adventure International games) the top window doesn't wrap. I noticed the hyphenated line at the bottom of the description runs too far but figured I could live with that? Are there occasions when the actual text is overrunning the screen edge? I just tested in WinFrotz and it simply cuts the end off text if you reduce the window's width but we are stuck with quite a small maximum width in Scratch by default.

As for the extra newline, I've added that to my bug list - thank you

I was very pleased with how the image->data worked out. Especially being able to use it while the barcode type screens are concealed. I thought about using 256 colours for one byte per pixel rather than one bit per pixel. It would have used far less image space but I figured it would be approximately 32 times slower!

imfh wrote:

In “Mission: Impossible,” if you travel West then South, it cuts off “Chair bolted to the floor” in the middle of “bolted.” Looking at an emulated version, “Chair bolted to the floor” is put on a new line for some reason: https://archive.org/details/a2_asimov_mission_impossible

imfh wrote:

If it's easy to do, it might look better if you replaced the hyphenated line with ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ like it does in the emulated version. It would just be a small visual tweak though so it might not be worth the effort.

imfh wrote:

I would guess that the newline in front of the unrecognized command is something to do with how it flashes the input. There's probably a special character being treated as a newline somewhere.

RokCoder wrote:

imfh wrote:

In “Mission: Impossible,” if you travel West then South, it cuts off “Chair bolted to the floor” in the middle of “bolted.” Looking at an emulated version, “Chair bolted to the floor” is put on a new line for some reason: https://archive.org/details/a2_asimov_mission_impossible

Thanks for the link - made it much easier to see what you were describing. You were playing an emulated version of the original release. I actually made a Scott Adams interpreter many moons ago which you can find in my Adventure Studio. Unfortunately it broken in the transition to Scratch 3.0 (as did most of the adventures in that studio). I'll modify them with the UI of this project at some point… Anyway, the original games weren't z-code. They were translated to z-code later to make them readily available but that's where the differences creep in. If you play the z-code versions on any interpreter you'll find the same issues if you reduce the screen width. There's not really much I an do about that without adding special case per-game code into the interpreter which I don't really want to do.

RokCoder wrote:

Thanks very much for taking the time to report all of the above

Peace_ful8 wrote:

Having issues storing my save codes. It gets cut off by a … which means I cannot copy most of it. What do I do?