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33. Menu-driven help (not really a part of the game itself) (lines 3487-3766)

3487  [ HelpMenu;
3488      if (menu_item == 0) {
3489          item_width = 8;
3490          item_name = "About Adventure";
3491          if (deadflag == 2) return 4;
3492          else               return 3;
3493      }
3494      if (menu_item == 1) {
3495          item_width = 6;
3496          item_name = "Instructions";
3497      }
3498      if (menu_item == 2) {
3499          item_width = 4;
3500          item_name = "History";
3501      }
3502      if (menu_item == 3) {
3503          item_width = 6;
3504          item_name = "Authenticity";
3505      }
3506      if (menu_item == 4) {
3507          item_width = 7;
3508          item_name = "Did you know...";
3509      }
3510  ];
3511   
3512  [ HelpInfo;
3513      if (menu_item == 1) {
3514          print
3515              "I know of places, actions, and things.
3516               You can guide me using commands that are complete sentences.
3517               To move, try commands like ~enter,~ ~east,~ ~west,~ ~north,~ ~south,~
3518               ~up,~ ~down,~ ~enter building,~ ~climb pole,~ etc.^^";
3519          print
3520              "I know about a few special objects, like a black rod hidden in the cave.
3521               These objects can be manipulated using some of the action words that I know.
3522               Usually you will need to give a verb followed by an object
3523               (along with descriptive adjectives when desired),
3524               but sometimes I can infer the object from the verb alone.
3525               Some objects also imply verbs; in particular, ~inventory~ implies ~take inventory~,
3526               which causes me to give you a list of what you're carrying.
3527               The objects have side effects; for instance, the rod scares the bird.^^";
3528          print
3529              "Many commands have abbreviations.
3530               For example, you can type ~i~ in place of ~inventory,~
3531               ~x object~ instead of ~examine object,~ etc.^^";
3532          print
3533              "Usually people having trouble moving just need to try a few more words.
3534               Usually people trying unsuccessfully to manipulate an object are attempting
3535               something beyond their (or my!) capabilities and should try a completely different tack.^^";
3536          print
3537              "Note that cave passages turn a lot, and that leaving a room to the north
3538               does not guarantee entering the next from the south.^^";
3539          print
3540              "If you want to end your adventure early, type ~quit~.
3541               To suspend your adventure such that you can continue later, type ~save,~
3542               and to resume a saved game, type ~restore.~
3543               To see how well you're doing, type ~score~.
3544               To get full credit for a treasure, you must have left it safely in the building,
3545               though you get partial credit just for locating it.
3546               You lose points for getting killed, or for quitting, though the former costs you more.
3547               There are also points based on how much (if any) of the cave you've managed to explore;
3548               in particular, there is a large bonus just for getting in
3549               (to distinguish the beginners from the rest of the pack),
3550               and there are other ways to determine whether you've been through
3551               some of the more harrowing sections.^^";
3552          print
3553              "If you think you've found all the treasures, just keep exploring for a while.
3554               If nothing interesting happens, you haven't found them all yet.
3555               If something interesting *does* happen, it means you're getting a bonus
3556               and have an opportunity to garner many more points in the master's section.^^";
3557          "Good luck!";
3558      }
3559      if (menu_item == 2) {
3560          print
3561              "Perhaps the first adventurer was a mulatto slave named Stephen Bishop, born about 1820:
3562               `slight, graceful, and very handsome'; a `quick, daring, enthusiastic' guide
3563               to the Mammoth Cave in the Kentucky karst.
3564               The story of the Cave is a curious microcosm of American history.
3565               Its discovery is a matter of legend dating back to the 1790s;
3566               it is said that a hunter, John Houchin, pursued a wounded bear to a large pit
3567               near the Green River and stumbled upon the entrance.
3568               The entrance was thick with bats and by the War of 1812 was intensively mined for guano,
3569               dissolved into nitrate vats to make saltpetre for gunpowder.
3570               After the war prices fell; but the Cave became a minor side-show when a dessicated
3571               Indian mummy was found nearby, sitting upright in a stone coffin, surrounded by talismans.
3572               In 1815, Fawn Hoof, as she was nicknamed after one of the charms,
3573               was taken away by a circus, drawing crowds across America
3574               (a tour rather reminiscent of Don McLean's song `The Legend of Andrew McCrew').
3575               She ended up in the Smithsonian but by the 1820s the Cave was being called
3576               one of the wonders of the world, largely due to her posthumous efforts.^^";
3577          print
3578              "By the early nineteenth century European caves were big tourist attractions,
3579               but hardly anyone visited the Mammoth, `wonder of the world' or not.
3580               Nor was it then especially large (the name was a leftover from the miners,
3581               who boasted of their mammoth yields of guano).
3582               In 1838, Stephen Bishop's owner bought up the Cave.
3583               Stephen, as (being a slave) he was invariably called, was by any standards a remarkable man:
3584               self-educated in Latin and Greek, he became famous as the `chief ruler' of his underground realm.
3585               He explored and named much of the layout in his spare time, doubling the known map in a year.
3586               The distinctive flavour of the Cave's names -- half-homespun American, half-classical --
3587               started with Stephen: the River Styx, the Snowball Room, Little Bat Avenue, the Giant Dome.
3588               Stephen found strange blind fish, snakes, silent crickets, the remains of cave bears
3589               (savage, playful creatures, five feet long and four high, which became extinct
3590               at the end of the last Ice Age), centuries-old Indian gypsum workings and ever more cave.
3591               His 1842 map, drafted entirely from memory, was still in use forty years later.^^";
3592          print
3593              "As a tourist attraction (and, since Stephen's owner was a philanthropist,
3594               briefly a sanatorium for tuberculosis, owing to a hopeless medical theory)
3595               the Cave became big business: for decades nearby caves were hotly seized
3596               and legal title endlessly challenged.
3597               The neighbouring chain, across Houchins Valley in the Flint Ridge,
3598               opened the Great Onyx Cave in 1912.
3599               By the 1920s, the Kentucky Cave Wars were in full swing.
3600               Rival owners diverted tourists with fake policemen, employed stooges
3601               to heckle each other's guided tours, burned down ticket huts,
3602               put out libellous and forged advertisements.
3603               Cave exploration became so dangerous and secretive that finally in 1941 the U.S. Government
3604               stepped in, made much of the area a National Park and effectively banned caving.
3605               The gold rush of tourists was, in any case, waning.^^";
3606          print
3607              "Convinced that the Mammoth and Flint Ridge caves were all linked in a huge chain,
3608               explorers tried secret entrances for years, eventually winning official backing.
3609               Throughout the 1960s all connections from Flint Ridge -- difficult and water-filled tunnels
3610               -- ended frustratingly in chokes of boulders.
3611               A `reed-thin' physicist, Patricia Crowther, made the breakthrough in 1972
3612               when she got through the Tight Spot and found a muddy passage:
3613               it was a hidden way into the Mammoth Cave.^^";
3614          print
3615              "Under the terms of his owner's will, Stephen Bishop was freed in 1856,
3616               at which time the cave boasted 226 avenues, 47 domes, 23 pits and 8 waterfalls.
3617               He died a year later, before he could buy his wife and son.
3618               In the 1970s, Crowther's muddy passage was found on his map.^^";
3619          print
3620              "The Mammoth Cave is huge, its full extent still a matter of speculation
3621               (estimates vary from 300 to 500 miles).
3622               Although this game has often been called ~Colossal Cave~,
3623               it is actually a simulation of the Bedquilt Cave region.
3624               Here is Will Crowther's story of how it came about:^^";
3625          print
3626              "~I had been involved in a non-computer role-playing game called Dungeons and Dragons
3627               at the time, and also I had been actively exploring in caves --
3628               Mammoth Cave in Kentucky in particular.
3629               Suddenly, I got involved in a divorce, and that left me a bit pulled apart in various ways.
3630               In particular I was missing my kids.
3631               Also the caving had stopped, because that had become awkward,
3632               so I decided I would fool around and write a program that was a re-creation
3633               in fantasy of my caving, and also would be a game for the kids,
3634               and perhaps some aspects of the Dungeons and Dragons that I had been playing.^^";
3635          print
3636              "~My idea was that it would be a computer game that would not be intimidating
3637               to non-computer people, and that was one of the reasons why I made it so that
3638               the player directs the game with natural language input, instead of more standardized commands.
3639               My kids thought it was a lot of fun.~
3640               [Quoted in ~Genesis II: Creation and Recreation with Computers~, Dale Peterson (1983).]^^";
3641          print
3642              "Crowther's original FORTRAN program had five or so treasures, but no formal scoring.
3643               The challenge was really to explore, though there was opposition from for instance the snake.
3644               Like the real Bedquilt region, Crowther's simulation has a map on about four levels
3645               of depth and is rich in geological detail.
3646               A good example is the orange column which descends to the Orange River Rock room
3647               (where the bird lives): the real column is of orange travertine,
3648               a beautiful mineral found in wet limestone.^^";
3649          print
3650              "The game's language is loaded with references to caving, to `domes' and `crawls'.
3651               A `slab room', for instance, is a very old cave whose roof has begun to break away
3652               into sharp flakes which litter the floor in a crazy heap.
3653               The program's use of the word `room' for all manner of caves and places
3654               seems slightly sloppy in everyday English, but is widespread in American caving
3655               and goes back as far as Stephen Bishop: so the Adventure-games usage of the word `room'
3656               to mean `place' may even be bequeathed from him.^^";
3657          print
3658              "The game took its decisive step toward puzzle-solving when Don Woods, a student at Stanford,
3659               debugged and expanded it.
3660               He tripled the number of treasures and added the non-geological zones:
3661               everything from the Troll Bridge onward, together with most of the antechambers on the Bedquilt level.
3662               All of the many imitations and extensions of the original Adventure
3663               are essentially based on Woods's 350-point edition.
3664               (Many bloated, corrupted or enhanced -- it depends how you see it --
3665               versions of the game are in Internet circulation, and the most useful way to identify them
3666               is by the maximum attainable score.
3667               Many versions exist scoring up to around the 400s and 500s, and one up to 1000.
3668               Woods himself continues to release new versions of his game;
3669               most of the other extenders haven't his talent.)^^";
3670          print
3671              "Although the game has veered away from pure simulation, a good deal of it remains realistic.
3672               Cavers do turn back when their carbide lamps flicker;
3673               there are indeed mysterious markings and initials on the cave walls, some left by the miners,
3674               some by Bishop, some by 1920s explorers.
3675               Of course there isn't an active volcano in central Kentucky, nor are there dragons and dwarves.
3676               But even these embellishments are, in a sense, derived from tradition:
3677               like most of the early role-playing games, `Adventure' owes much to J. R. R. Tolkien's
3678               `The Hobbit', and the passage through the mountains and Moria of `The Lord of the Rings'
3679               (arguably its most dramatic and atmospheric passage).
3680               Tolkien himself, the most successful myth-maker of the twentieth century,
3681               worked from the example of Icelandic, Finnish and Welsh sagas.^^";
3682          print
3683              "By 1977 tapes of `Adventure' were being circulated widely, by the Digital user group DECUS,
3684               amongst others: taking over lunchtimes and weekends wherever it went... but that's another story.
3685               (Tracy Kidder's fascinating book `The Soul of a New Machine', a journalist's-eye-view
3686               of a mainframe computer development group, catches it well.)^^";
3687          "This is a copy at third or fourth hand: from Will Crowther's original
3688           to Donald Woods's 350-point edition to Donald Ekman's PC port to
3689           David M. Baggett's excellent TADS version (1993), to this.^^";
3690      }
3691      if (menu_item == 3) {
3692          print
3693              "This port is fairly close to the original.
3694               The puzzles, items and places of Woods's original 350-point version are exactly those here.^^";
3695          print
3696              "I have added a few helpful messages, such as ~This is a dead end.~, here and there:
3697               and restored some ~initial position~ messages from objects, such as the (rather lame)
3698               ^^  There is tasty food here.^^
3699               from source files which are certainly early but of doubtful provenance.
3700               They seem to sit well with the rest of the text.^^";
3701          print
3702              "The scoring system is the original, except that you no longer lose 4 points for quitting
3703               (since you don't get the score if you quit an Inform game, this makes no difference)
3704               and, controversially, I award 5 points for currently carrying a treasure, as some early 1980s ports did.
3705               The rank names are tidied up a little.
3706               The only significant rule change is that one cannot use magic words
3707               until their destinations have been visited.^^";
3708          print
3709              "The dwarves are simpler in their movements, but on the other hand I have added
3710               a very few messages to make them interact better with the rest of the game.
3711               The probabilities are as in the original game.^^";
3712          print
3713              "In the original one could type the name of a room to visit it:
3714               for the sake of keeping the code small, I have omitted this feature, but with some regrets.
3715               [RF: this feature incorporated into Release 9.]^^";
3716          print
3717              "The text itself is almost everywhere preserved intact, but I've corrected some
3718               spelling and grammatical mistakes (and altered a couple of utterly misleading and gnomic remarks).
3719               The instructions have been slightly altered (for obvious reasons) but are basically as written.^^";
3720          "A good source for details is David Baggett's source code, which is circulated on the Internet.";
3721      }
3722      print "Did you know that...^^";
3723      print
3724          "The five dwarves have a 96% chance of following you, except into light, down pits or
3725           when admiring themselves: and the nasty little knives are 9.5% accurate.^^";
3726      print "Dragons burn up dwarves (perhaps because dwarves eat only coal).^^";
3727      print
3728          "The bear (who likes the volcano) is too heavy for the bridge...
3729           and you can go back to the scene after being resurrected.^^";
3730      print
3731          "You can slip past the snake into the secret E/W canyon, 35% of the time at any rate.
3732           And walking about in the dark is not all that gruesome:
3733           it carries only a 25% risk of falling down a pit.^^";
3734      print "The vase does not like being immersed.^^";
3735      print "Shadowy figures can wave to each other.^^";
3736      print "Watering the hinges of the door rusts them up again.^^";
3737      print
3738          "When the cave closes, the grate is locked and the keys are thrown away,
3739           creatures run off and the crystal bridge vanishes...^^";
3740      print
3741          "...and a completely useless hint is written on the giant oyster's shell in the end game.
3742           (To make this hint slightly fairer, I've altered one word and placed suggestions elsewhere in the game.)^^";
3743      "The last lousy point can be won by... but no. That would be telling.";
3744  ];
3745   
3746  [ HelpSub;
3747      if (deadflag ~= 2)
3748          DoMenu(
3749              "There is information provided on the following:^
3750              ^     Instructions for playing
3751              ^     A historical preface
3752              ^     How authentic is this edition?^", HelpMenu, HelpInfo);
3753      else
3754          DoMenu(
3755              "There is information provided on the following:^
3756              ^     Instructions for playing
3757              ^     A historical preface
3758              ^     How authentic is this edition?
3759              ^     Did you know...^", HelpMenu, HelpInfo);
3760  ];
3761   
3762  [ Amusing; HelpSub(); ];
3763   
3764  Verb 'help'
3765      *                       -> Help;
3766   


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This page was originally managed by Graham Nelson (graham@gnelson.demon.co.uk) assisted by C Knight.