Randy Hyde's HLA Begets OS Adventure Game

jg21 writes "Paul Panks already has 30 text adventure games to his credit, and he's just written a report at LinuxWorld explaining how, when he came across Randall Hyde's website, he realized that Hyde's High Level Assembly language warranted a new departure - writing an open-source textadventure game. The result is "HLA Adventure" which he released into the public domain so anyone may contribute to the expansion of the game world, creatures within the world, and additional quests. HLA Adventure has its own Yahoo group." We recently covered HLA in our Developers section.

This HLA thingy...

[BigBadDude]

looks very productive, maybe someone at the valve should take a look at it?

Hmmmm.....horrible flashbacks

[schild]

Ever since I first programmed on a MUD the ease of letting people add content amazed me (possibly because I was much younger than I am now). There's something to be said about a game language that has a 'wiki' level of interaction. The word would be 'neat' if there was any amount of quality assurance that was applied to this concept. Unfortunately there isn't, which resulted in why I left many *Mud projects and why this probably won't work as well as it does in theory.

Why?

[News for nerds]

Why does it have to be HLA? Color text? Or is it for some esoteric platforms with 32KB memory? If not so, using Perl will suffice to make a text adv. Or even JavaScript and a web browser.

Re:Why?

[gl4ss]

dunno. maybe he wanted a 'good' reason to use a lot of JMP's, BSR's or whatevers their equivalent in HLA, goto do what goto does.

Re:Why?

[John Harrison]

From reading the article it looks like this guy knows several varieties of Basic and has now learned HLA. He doesn't mention any other languages.

This does bring up an interesting question, what is the best language to write a text adventure in? Lisp? Perl? ML?

Aren't the Infocom games written in their own language for a virtual machine?

Re:Why?

[Maggot75]

Let's not start a high level scripting language advocacy war on this, shall we? :)
I think any high level scripting language should be quite efficient for the job - all you need is some simple game logic engine and a text parser.
Writing a game logic engine isn't trivial, but it's at least no harder in a scripting language than in assembler.
And of course, all the content. I don't know whether mr. Panks writes the game content in HLA as well?
Btw, there are some links to interactive fiction interpreters (inclu

Inform

[stardeep]

> Aren't the Infocom games written in their own language for a virtual machine?

They were written for the so-called Z-machine. Many Z-machine games are written in Inform [inform-fiction.org] nowadays.

Re:Why?

[LWATCDR]

There are a few reasons not to write a text adventure in Lisp/Perl/ML/Some Basics/Python/scheme/or java.
One is the runtime. Not everyone that might want to run you game will have Perl/Lisp.... installed on there system. Sometimes it is really nice to just download an EXE file. The issue with that is you never know what the exe file REALLY does and it will only work under one system. Of course you could run it with dosemu under linux if you wanted to.
For this guy I guess he WANTED to write in in HLA. I guess

Re:Why?

[Tom7]

It seems to me that the right thing is to develop your own small language along with an engine for interpreting it. ML happens to excel at parsing and interpreting languages, but just about anything with built in lists and strings is going to blow the pants off assembly for this task!

Re:Why?

[Alan Shutko]

The best languages for text adventures are probably Inform [inform-fiction.org] and TADS [tads.org], two languages specifically designed for that purpose.

Their advantages are a good runtime system including the parser, large development communities (well, as large as interactive fiction gets), lots of sample code to help learn, good documentation. The runtime is the key. Each has interpreters on lots and lots of platforms, and they take care of things so you don't have to. Things like undo, parsing commands, formatting, etc.

Re:Why?

[Maggot75]

It seems that this question goes wholly unanswered. The only specific mention of HLA is:

HLA stands for High Level Assembly, and it's a great way for people to learn assembly without being submerged off the bat in offsets, memory locations and MOV instructions.

There is nothing on the website that explains why the author didn't choose a scripting language instead - my guess is that the author simply didn't think of a better way, and is obsessed with writing in assembly, for speed of execution.

Re:Why?

[Unoti]

An Adventure game is a great project for learning assembler. The author is apparently a novelist, too, so this would be a great way for him to merge his passion for assembly with his passion for creating fiction. It's a lot more interesting to write it in HLA than in another language. Everybody that writes in assembler knows that it's a waste of time to write something in assembly that can't be written in a higher level language and still run at an acceptable speed. Assembly is just fun. It also may ha

Re:Why?

[afabbro]

If you were serious about making a text adventure game, you would use either TADS or Inform. cf. rec.arts.int-fiction

in case you're having trouble finding the story

[kwoff]

(not that you're looking for the story, as this is Slashdot)

You are in a twisty maze of an e-zine web page. Before you is a banner ad. To the south are two magazine ads.
> scroll down
You are between two magazine ads. To the east are Google ads.
> scroll down
You found a title!
> read
Before you is a summary.
> scroll down
Look out, a large box ad is lurking nearby!
> read
The page has refreshed!
> read
You found more Google ads.
> scroll down
You found information on the author.
> scroll down
You are being chased by ads disguised as links!
> scroll down quickly
Didn't understand command modifier "quickly".
> scroll down
You were eaten by a big orange footer ad.
Start over [Y/n]?

Re:in case you're having trouble finding the story

[Inda]

So funny that I'll leave the 'Friday is burn Karma day' alone this week.

Cheers :)

What a name!

[Chemisor]

I wonder what kind of an adventure game it is given that the developer's name is Randy Hyde.

Re:What a name!

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the source file the author is Paul Panks, aka PAP. "Bug-fixed by: Frank Kotler, Randy Hyde, many others..."

You should give the source a read. The turf wars in it are hilarious. Some choice excerpts:

// Sorry Frank, had to add in all the stuff.
// "Horrible kludge!" :) /PAP

// Frank, lay off the yellow pills... :) /PAP

stdout.puts("Fixed by Frank Kotler" nl nl);

// YIPES! Every time through the loop?
// I know, I know. Parse is the loop from hell. :) /PAP

// Frank's debugging code. Please leave i

Wrong

[Tom7]

Assembly language is absolutely, with no doubt, the wrong language for writing adventure games.

Re:Wrong

[GeckoX]

Looks like it worked for this guy, what's your beef?

Re:Wrong

[Tom7]

My beef is that the use of assembly language for programming tasks as high-level as this is ridiculous, and that slashdot is doing a disservice to the world by promoting it.

Re:Wrong

[GeckoX]

Why do you care how this guy went about doing this?
That's what is ridiculous.

Guy deserves some credit for this, at the very least he's not deserving of belittlement for his choice of tool to write it in.

Re:Wrong

[Tom7]

Why do any of us care how he went about doing this? It's fine for him to have fun doing it, but if that's all this is about, then it doesn't warrant a slashdot story. If it's actually interesting enough to deserve a story (which I don't think it is), then the story should at least have the tone of "look at this crazy thing that someone did!" instead of "HLA is a useful and increasingly popular language for developing applications, such as adventure games." The latter is essentially the tone of the article a

Why I chose HLA

[dunric]

To answer the above:

I chose HLA because it was a relatively new programming experience for me. I wrote adventure games in BASIC for so long, that I grew tired of the language.

HLA -- on the other hand -- seems like a very interesting programming language. BASIC teaches somewhat backward fundamentals, but those have carried over into a plethora of BASIC interpreters and compilers over the years.

Just look at PowerBASIC and Liberty BASIC, to name a few. Despite flaws, non-Dartmouth BASIC has thrived for a lo

Why I chose HLA (reposted)

[dunric]

I chose HLA because it was a relatively new programming experience for me. I wrote
adventure games in BASIC for so long, that I grew tired of the language.

HLA -- on the other hand -- seems like a very interesting programming
language. BASIC teaches somewhat backward fundamentals, but those have
carried over into a plethora of BASIC interpreters and compilers over
the years.

Just look at PowerBASIC and Liberty BASIC, to name a few. Despite
flaws, non-Dartmouth BASIC has thrived for a long time. Now it is
on the w

HLA Adventure is now in the Public Domain

[dunric]

Hello,

As of June 12, 2004, "HLA Adventure" is released into the Public Domain.

The Creative Commons License for "HLA Adventure" is listed on the HLA Adventure website below:

http://members.tripod.com/~panks/hlaadv.html

This means that:

1) "HLA Adventure" is free to distribute, modify, make derivative works thereof, and otherwise use.

2) "Mippy the Dragon" is also free to distribute, modify, make derivative works thereof, and otherwise use.

3) "HLA Adventure" and "Mippy the Dragon" are no longer Copyrighted