Hugo Engine and Guilty Bastards for Linux 83
Kent Tessman writes "I've released a Linux port of Hugo (an adventure game creation system for BeOS, DOS, Win32, Amiga, Acorn, Macintosh, OS/2, and Unix in general) The major Hugo release so far is Guilty Bastards, a tongue-in-cheek Los Angeles detective story. Screenshots and more information are also available Both Hugo and Guilty Bastards are free--I hope people have fun with them. " Actually looks surprisingly interesting.
Re:In search of "The Game" (Score:1)
Do you ever wonder, "Why am I here?" (Score:1)
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Re:games and the average user (Score:1)
Re:games and the average user (Score:1)
Can you say Sierra Interactive? The King's Quest games were basically IF with graphics and mousing. So another comment was right: This is about the place DOS games were in the 1980's.
Re:Any other Infocom junkies out there? (Score:1)
Re:Didn't work for me. (Score:1)
Then I build hewx and, while it did build successfully, it was messed up enough to render it unplayable. On the normal game screen I couldn't see any of the text output. If I went to 'show scrollback window', I could see the game output, but then I couldn't type.
Oh well.
Re:Didn't work for me. (Score:1)
I got it from here [hw.ac.uk]. Brilliant game, BTW!
Re:This looks quite poor. (Score:1)
Amazing... why do you feel that in order to be interesting a game must have lots of graphics and sound, and such. While there's nothing inherently wrong with either, it's quite rare to see a game that really takes advantage of them.
Myst is probably the best, and it's nothing more than a glorified text game.
And much as I like Marathon, first person shooters have a lot more to do with reflexes than anything else. Slapjack is not wholly dissimilar. (and id games are really ugly anyway... so much brown...)
I'm a big fan of text games. I played most of the old Infocom games on an Apple II in their hayday. And there are still a *lot* of really good ones out there. Of course, it's not usually listed in the system requirements, but you need to have a functional IMAGINATION. When you 'look' you have to use your brain to interpret the flavor text. But, as it happens, the imagination is very good at this sort of thing, if you've got one. The scariest picture in the world can't come close to what really scares you. 'You see a shady glen.' tells me a great deal with a mere 20-odd bytes. Maybe there are birches. I like them, so there are. I'm not reliant on what some other guy thinks it looks like.
While pretty much any computer nowadays can put up 3d spaceships and a midi soundtrack (hell, I played flight sims on a Mac Plus many moons ago) this does not always mean that a good game requires 3d spaceships and midi. Or whatever.
Text games are more or less the heart of computer games. They create a story and a setting with a minimum of cruft. At the heart of any good game (barring cards, or number games, or basic things like that) is going to be some kind of story. Multimedia just narrows down the possibilities that the story might contain to the narrow few that the author envisioned. It leaves little room for interpretation. It doesn't really let you make the story _your_own_.
I haven't played this particular game, but it might easily be a jillion times better than the best game on Dreamcast or Windows. Try to imagine it, but maybe it'll be a jillion times better because it gets you involved and isn't just eye candy. Crappy games are going to be crappy no matter how sparkly they are. Good games are going to be good even if they're 7bit ASCII text and require you to invest in a good stock of graph paper.
I suggest that you try it. If you let yourself, you might even like it....
Re:How Free? (Score:1)
Well, all the folks that started with overclocking their Voodoo cards to get an extra 0.3 fps in classic Quake later graduated to spending that excess energy reading the minutae of software licenses and expounding endlessly about them on Slashdot, while blindly moderating up anything posted by Bruce Perens or Alan Cox.
Recently, most of those have also moved on again to being specialists in evolution theory and theology, although there is still a healthy population of Slashdotters who remain in the original two categories, some of which have made a sideways move into the exciting hobby of finding new ways to misspell "Windows" and "Microsoft."
That's about what's happened to Slashdot while _I've_ been around....
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Re:Linux Game (Score:1)
Re:They have the right idea (Score:3)
The most well-known of these is Inform [demon.co.uk], a language written to produce bytecode for the Z-Machine, which is the virtual machine that Infocom used for their classic adventures. So, if there's a z-code interpreter available for your machine (which there almost certainly is), you can play all of the old Infocom games and most of the new Interactive Fiction games with it. Inform has some bitmap graphics capability, but few games use it -- most of the ones that do were written by Infocom (Zork Zero, Shogun, Arthur, and Journey).
There's also TADS [tela.bc.ca], the Text Adventure Development System, which is somewhat similar to Inform but not as well known. This might be because it used to be shareware. TADS interpreters are also available on a wide range of systems, but not all of the interpreters handle all of the fancy new TADS features, like styled text, sound, and graphics. HUGO, the system mentioned here, is generally thought of as the third of the big three IF languages -- it's not quite as popular and not quite as ported. It's still a good language, though, and it's great to finally see a Linux port of the environment.
Re:This looks quite poor. (Score:2)
The GLX code in the new release will also allow network-transparent OpenGL - i.e. you can run hardware-accelerated OpenGL programs
OpenGL is an excellent 2D and 3D graphics api, much better than directx. (yes, though most people hear of opengl for 3D, it's fine at 2D too...)
OpenGL
There is also the persistent myth that X is slow.
- well, across a network it wouldn't be fast, but X has had shared memory extensions for years for accelerating local clients, and DGA for fullscreen 2D rendering. It's
q3test for linux is already running great on my voodoo banshee, thanks to Daryll Strauss' efforts (glide.xxedgexx.com) It uses the Mesa OpenGL api running on top of the linux glide port.
check out www,precisioninsight.com and www.xfree86.org
More worrying is sound... perhaps ALSA will result in better sound support. I still miss AHI on the amiga. but then again, the amiga was near-realtime ( by sacrificing such luxuries as memory protection...d'oh!), so latency problems were much smaller.
Re:Why a "Linux Port"? (Score:1)
Re:games and the average user (Score:1)
for writing Interactive Fiction (text adventures,
to the rest of you), I don't think you can get too
far from the CLI. Of course, Hugo (as well as
TADS and Inform, it's competitors) allows both
graphics and sound, so a gui is nice too. Maybe
it's time to compromise?
The licensing for those that are concerned (Score:2)
The use of the Hugo library files and the distribution of the
Hugo Engine are authorized so long as all transactions are
non-commercial and free of charge (except in cases where any
charge is to cover the cost of distribution), and that the
library files and engine are not distributed in a modified
form.
Innocent1 (Dalnet Irc, #Linux)
How Free? (Score:3)
Second, I think s/he who writes the software can choose whatever license s/he wants.
But I'm just trying to understand this license. It's at best contradictory. From http://www. ifarchive.org/if-archive/programming/hugo/manuals/ manual.txt [ifarchive.org]:
I.a. Legal Notes
The use of the Hugo library files and the distribution of the Hugo Engine are authorized so long as all transactions are non-commercial and free of charge (except in cases where any charge is to cover the cost of distribution), and that the library files and engine are not distributed in a modified form.
So, no distribution of modified versions, which means non-[libre-]free. But then there's section I.b., which says:
I.b. (Less Legal Notes)
The source to the Hugo Library, of course, cannot be distributed in modified form unless it is expressly indicated that it was a.) written by Kent Tessman, and b.) subsequently modified and distributed by someone else.
First, that "of course" is just a bit silly, given the huge amount of truly open source software in the world today, including the Linux kernel itself. But regardless, these two statements are contradictory. A clarification needs to be made.
And finally... I can't believe I'm the first person in this forum to even mention this. What has happened to /.? -sigh-
Flames to /dev/null.
Me Neither (Score:1)
Except I got a different error:
hewx: error in loading shared libraries: hewx: undefined symbol: _9wxAppBase.m_appInitFn
But then, I'm on Debian (Potato). Maybe there's some kind of library version incompatibility here. I dunno.
Re:Is it multiuser? (Score:1)
I don't know, it's not just the language object model that needs to be made multiple-Player-Character aware, it's the library. I don't know enough about Hugo's library to comment accurately, but I expect it's (like most of Hugo) sort of like Inform and TADS, only cleaned up. And that would require more than just a simple bodge because the library contains a lot of game logic, and game logic is wildly different when there is more than one PC, especially on massively-multiple-PC MU** systems.
I guess the reason for the difference is that a single-PC game is telling a story and knows a lot about what has happened so far; it can provide very specific responses which may aspire to being actual literature and that. Whereas a multi-PC game has far more possible states and cannot hope to give the same sort of response as single-player IF; its reponses are by necessity much more formulaic, and less suitable for story-telling.
The exception, perhaps, is games that don't attempt to tell a story; simple collections of puzzles like the original Zork, Colossal Cave and so on. But it is still extremely difficult to design puzzles that can equally be solved by a single player or multiple concurrent players.
So what I'm saying, I think, is that single-player IF is a sufficiently different beastie from MUD-style to make a common framework system for both not especially useful. And I don't think it's possible to design a satisfying text game that can work equally as a single- or multiple-PC experience.
Unless anyone wants to prove me wrong...
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Re:How Free? (Score:1)
- Binaries, for running the game
> The source to the Hugo Library, of course, cannot be distributed in modified form unless
- Source, for hacking with / improving
Not contradictory, but still confusing
Looked interesting, but doesn't seem to work. (Score:1)
(Yeah, yeah, so I was in Windows. I only use my Windows partition for games and DVD's. And I just finished watching Tron, to myeahh)
Re:For those interested in the Zork'en... (Score:1)
SIgh
Re:Ever hear of ZZT? (Score:2)
You mean that the story only made it because it got ported to Linux. I submited a story about an announcement by Be Inc. that Shogo: Mobile Armor Division was being ported to BeOS. The port is even being done by the same company who makes the windows version. I figured this was a major step for the game industry because it showed a game company (Other than Id) that is going to make it's game for windows and an alternate OS in house instead of outsourcing it. But since the game was being ported to BeOS, and not to Linux, it wasn't good enought to be Slashdot material...
PS: This will probably be moderated down as a Flamebait
Re:For those interested in the Zork'en... (Score:1)
Not entirely true...
There were a few non-IF games out of Infocom (some came out after Activision absorbed Infocom) that are not on the LTOI collections. "Frobiscky" (sp) was a multi-player party quiz game. "Quarterstaff: Tomb of Setmoth" was a graphical RPG for the Mac (I'd still give an arm for a copy of it.) And a Battletech game ("Cresent Hawk's Inception", I think) that was an overhead, turn-based RPG-like adventure game. I'm not mentioning Cornerstone or the dreadful InfoComics, but neither really qualifies as a "treasure" anyway.
As a side note, the ads for Quarterstaff, my experience playing Cresent Hawk's Inception, and reading a description of Larn for the Amiga all led me to write what I now recognize as a Rouge-like for the Commodore 64 called "Orn", but by the time I got done with it, I was off of Q-Link and didn't think anyone on the Internet would want it.
Towards the end of my C-64 days, I was spending a ton of time playing games from an IF-creation system that had been ported from Apple II, but I can't remember the name of it. The cool thing was that you could carry your character over from game to game. The bad thing was the parser sucked (verb/noun only). Ah, the good ol' days!
Re:Didn't work for me. (Score:1)
It's in
ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/incoming/hugov25_wxwin _linux.tar.gz
and will migrate to /if-archive/programming/hugo/executables/.
The reason for doing this in the first place (a Linux binary release) was to incorporate the fixed MikMod library (since a couple of important things are broken in the current release).
Sorry for any inconvenience.
--Kent Tessman
Hugo is a great system. (Score:1)
Mycroft-X
Cool! (Score:2)
Why a "Linux Port"? (Score:1)
If there's already a "Unix version" where's the difference to the Linux version? Isn't Linux "Unix" enough for a unified Unix port? I really doubt that there are special Linux features that make sense to support for this kind of application.
Sorry that I'm too lazy to download the different sources and make a comparison on my own :-)
BTW: It's really cool that there's an Acorn port. Long live RISC OS! Reminds me of mame where sometimes the Acorn port was more uptodate than the Windows one.
This looks really cool. (Score:1)
'Course, as anyone else who only uses Windows for games, anything that advances gaming on Linux is a very Good Thing (tm).
I can't help but think a lot of people could use this to create some really amazing and fun things.
games and the average user (Score:1)
Re:In search of "The Game" (Score:1)
yummy more games.. (Score:1)
char *stupidsig = "this is my dumb sig";
Is it multiuser? (Score:1)
They have the right idea (Score:3)
Our software development takes place across a broad spectrum of computer platforms, helped by the highly valued contributions of talented individuals around the world.
You can use our software on a wide variety of computer systems, including such leading-edge platforms as BeOS and Linux. Other supported operating systems range from Unix-powered workstations to Macintosh, Amiga to Acorn/RISC OS to OS/2, and even a couple you might have heard of from a company called Microsoft.
I think they have the right atitude; they support as much as they can. They also support the open-source community. By supporting an enourmous number of platforms and involving outside developers this company seems to be doing well.
I think we will see more companies use this type of model as more alternative OSs become popular.
More platforms + more developers = better code and more users.
-Davidu
Re:In search of "The Game" (Score:4)
A good place to hang around if you're into IF are rec.arts.int-fiction [rec.arts.int-fiction] and rec.games.int-fiction [rec.games.int-fiction].
STD disclaimer: yes, my English is crap. But surely you can make something out of it...
In search of "The Game" (Score:1)
Didn't work for me. (Score:1)
./hewx: Symbol `__vt_14wxImageHandler' has different size in shared object, consider re-linking
./hewx: Symbol `__vt_13wxJPEGHandler' has different size in shared object, consider re-linking
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
Re:Didn't work for me. (Score:1)
If you compile hewx from source (shouldn't take too long) you'll probably get it to work with a binary wxWindows rpm.
I think it's worth it if you are into these games. I only gave it a short try, but the parser felt much more sophisticated than the infocom one.
Finally, partly it's my fault. My debug wxWindows lib found a couple of small details that need to be fixed, but all last week I didn't find the time to send the author a bug report, let alone a
fix.
As an offtopic note (and shameless plug for wxWindows); touting the wxWindows port as a Linux port is a little beside the truth. wxWindows has bindings for gtk+, but gtk+ is hardly linux-only. It also supports Motif, Win32/16, with Mac and BeOS ports in progress.
Re:In search of "The Game" (Score:1)
I still think text-based adventure games are the best kind. They're always so much more imaginative, and incidentially require a lot more imagination to play. They aren't limited by graphics and animations. You see with your mind, not your eyes.
It's the same with books vs. Movies and television.
Anyway, it'd be cool to get back into those games. Maybe soon. I just wish I weren't so busy! Hey, maybe I'll set up a BBS on my Linux box and play Operation Overkill with my friend over telnet
Re:games and the average user (Score:1)
The Linux world's inability to address this issue will not give most people any reason to switch to Linux.
The linux community IS making inroads in this respect. From the rumors of corel's beginner friendly installation to tools like linuxconfig to xdm to the redhat xwindow package installation system to the file managers... Granted, it's going to be tough to completely eliminate the need for a command line but the CLI is still the most powerful way to do system maintainance amongst other things. It's not quite ready for primetime yet but given the current momentum not only in the marketing and buzz of linux but also in the development, I think we'll be there within a year from now. When we reach that point, it'll only serve to increase game and application development for linux which will attract more people...
Re:They have the right idea (Score:2)
Re:Why a "Linux Port"? (Score:2)
But your answers were not very satisfying for me, neither X11 nor wxWindows [wxwindows.org] is Linux specific. (wxWindows even runs on Win32).
Ok.
I've downloaded the sources and all I can tell now: There's nothing that qualifies it as "Linux" version, so talking of a new "linux port" is very missleading IMHO. On Unix systems you now have the choice of a command-line only, a Glk (if this library/toolkit is available for Unix...) or a wxWindows versions. That's it.
I'm currently trying to build wxWindows/gtk (for hewx) on my machine. But after ages of compiling I had to see that it doesn't like gtk-1.2.4 I have on my system :-(. So I've install gtk-1.0.6 as well and started over.
But then I noticed that hewx needs wx/caret.h wich wxWindows 2.01 (the latest stable release) doesn't have. }:-( - Argh! (The BUILD file of hewx tells you that it was developed with wxWindows 2.1 snapshot 8).
Since I'm too lazy and tired now to get a newer developement snapshot of wxWindows and (try to) compile it a third time (it really needs a lot of cycles!) I give up for today...
I really hope that my time was not completely wasted and this keeps other people from falling into the same pitfalls like me:-)
Re:Linux Game (Score:2)
DGA solves most of the basic "Make the GUI go away and give me 2D graphics with non-jittery pointer stuff" problems which were a complete pain just two or three years ago (remember crashes in SVGAlib Doom!)
OpenGL solves all your 3D niceness (yes, even extensions, though some stuff like the T-buffer may be too gimmicky for OGL)
The sound stuff is a bit of a mess, I admit, and while the OSS APIs were OK in an era when DOS games rolled their own DMA code I look forward to seeing something better from future Linux dists, perhaps ALSA?
Aside from the inevitable "Huh?" questions you get on any new platform, porting to Linux looks pretty OK to me. 90% of publishers just don't give a damn (they often feel the same way about NT) and that's fine, but don't blame their financial decisions on Linux.
Nick.
ALSA and latency (Score:3)
Re:Isnt that what java is for? (Score:1)
All that said, this type of game might lend itself nicely to a Java implementation. I haven't played it yet but it looks like 2D graphics and text. The mild Java slowdown ought to be acceptable for things like language parsing.
Re:the moderation problem in a nutshell, folks (Score:1)
Re:games and the average user (Score:1)
Re:Looked interesting, but doesn't seem to work. (Score:1)
If you're still interested, give it a shot under netscape...
Annual Interactive Fiction Contest--Linux Friendly (Score:4)
Re:This looks quite poor. (Score:1)
Developers don't want a broad selection of standards, they want one standard, so they only have to support one driver. If the Linux world wants to see more games, then it needs one good API for graphics, and one good API for sound (how about Alsa [alsa-project.org]?). In particular, fast graphics in X is a requirement.
Of course, the thing that will really draw the game companies is more users. Without users, APIs are useless. X needs to be really easy to setup for a wide variety of graphics cards and monitors before there will be more users. The basic Linux install has gotten quite easy, but the X configuration still needs work.
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Re:Why a "Linux Port"? (Score:2)
Re:This looks quite poor. (Score:1)
It has to change and it has to be done at the OS level ( possible XFree 4.0 will bring some sort of solution, don't know much about that yet - will see)
Another GPL Interactive Fiction Engine (Score:3)
http://cogengine.linuxbox.com
Re:Linux Game (Score:2)
*******
Re: (Score:2)
Re:games and the average user (Score:1)
More games for Linux == good. Linux drivers for wierd hardware so people can use Linux games == even better.
Hopefully, soon there will be Linux drivers for everything a company makes. Be it software modems, integrated devices, odd-interface devices, etc.
another "game" (Score:1)
I _know_ you guys remember that game. For some reason, I just thought it was cool.. I'd play that thing for hours. (ok, not _that_ long, but..)
just browsing through the recesses of my mind...
Re:Great to see some Interactive Fiction coverage. (Score:1)
I suppose there would be a lot of reusable code and good working examples of how to implement puzzles, though...
Re:Me Neither (Score:1)
Re:In search of "The Game" (Score:1)
There are several mirrors of the ftp.gmd.de archive in the US -- you might try http://ifarchive.org [ifarchive.org] for a nice web-based mirror.
Also, there are a variety of review sites for IF to help you choose a game you'd like. My favorite is Baf's Guide [wurb.com], which has nice capsule reviews and good subject indexes.
Re:Hugo is a great system. (Score:1)
I wonder about stuff like this, because on one hand it can be very useful to let artists concentrate on the content of the game. On the other hand, it can constrain a game. I mean, if you look at some of the best games around, most of them don't really have the same or very, very similar engines. They share some characteristics, but in large part they're different.
I don't know if you'd ever see a really successful game come out of this type of engine. I guess that's the point I'm trying to make.
Sujal
Re:For those interested in the Zork'en... (Score:1)
Education games for home and school using Hugo? (Score:1)
http://www.currents.net/magazine/texas/612/gmrv
http://new.shoptlc.com/corpproduct.asp?corp=1
Re:They have the right idea (Score:1)
We are in the position DOS based games developers were about 10 years ago
Re:This looks quite poor. (Score:1)
Does anyone know what development is going on in this area?
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Great to see some Interactive Fiction coverage. (Score:4)
If anyone is interrested in interactive fiction I can recommend the online fanzine xyzzy news http://www.xyzzynews.com/ [xyzzynews.com]
And to those complaining of the lack of graphics and 3D, I suppose you never read books either! To paraphrase an old quote,"Interactive Fiction has the best graphics in the world, your own imagination."
Re:They have the right idea (Score:1)
Sometimes I wonder about my dear Slashdot.
Re:Is it multiuser? (Score:2)
The main problem with making it multiplayer is the possibility for graphics. If it's in text-only mode, though, then it could be connected to with a simple telnet (as MUDs generally are).
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