Of course there were problems. One that I recall was that I didn't want to have to maintain k^n separate branches of story, so I'd prune off incorrect branches quickly by having your character die or something. :)
We hit the maximum depth for folders very quickly, so I came up with the idea of having a routing table at the base, which was just a single folder with folders labeled 1-10000 inside it. The idea was that you'd get to maximum depth, and then get a number to go into the routing table and continue the adventure. The hope was that there were so many folders within the routing table that it'd be impossible to guess a correct path by chance. (And of course, all the invalid folders had a message like "stop trying to cheat, you cheater! YOUR CHARACTER DIES INSTANTLY!" Remember... 5th grade. :))
I remember working frantically on a "foldermaze" at home for hours, then attempting to put it on a floppy disk. Turns out that is not the sort of operation Windows 95 was optimized for at all - it took hours. (The maze had tens of thousands of folders, most inside the routing table.) Then after a certain point it just failed with "disk full". This really stumped me as a 5th grader. How could the disk be full? Inspecting the properties of my foldermaze showed that it took up 0MB! Far less than the 1.44MB offered by the floppy...
Eventually I pieced together that folders must take up some marginal amount of space more than 0. The property inspector was lying to me! That was very surprising as a kid.
Anyways, this seems like what we did, but way more cool. :)
You could always merge storylines later on by symlinking them to the same place!
(Maybe not on Windows).
> (Maybe not on Windows).
Windows has "shortcuts", which should work if there is some problem with symbolic links.
I definitely need some scripting ability. For example, it would be nice if I could script mobs to perform certain actions during quests, something that I'd have to hard-code in Go right now.
And a game called "Virus!" on the Amiga in the early 1990's, which I haven't been able to track down.
But it bears little resemblance to this game, so I wonder if you are thinking of something else.
PS. I self-hosted this file, but what's the go-to service for flinging arbitrary files across the internet these days?
Could be this one, though it is for Windows.
It basically turn a folder tree into a Decent clone. Complete with using media files stored in said folders within the game.
I agree the gameplay is different, but the idea of working through your filesystem is what made me think of it.
But it is not new or hip anymore
you could turn this into a MUD by just letting people in via SSH. if you supported auto-reloading your YAML files during play (or just keeping track of loaded files), you could support online creation!
I'm fascinated.
find . -name "sword"In-world Lua is a great idea. All of the core MUD programming back then was, of course, written in C, but player (and admin) scripting was done with an embedded Perl interpreter.
You're right that it's never really done, but my theoretical goal is basically a bare-bones MUD written in Go that anyone else could pick up and turn into a fully featured one. More practically, I'll probably just make a couple dozen areas and stick it on a server and see if anyone wants to play before I spend too much more time on it.