Work in Progress
Creating evocative and realistic worlds within the restraints of a computer system is always going to be hard, especially if you also want the user to feel genuinely free to do as they please within that environment. Short of completely life-like virtual reality systems, perhaps the one area where computers can stand equal with more conventional media in their abilities is in their ability to display text. A book read on a computer screen is no more nor no less evocative than a book read from a piece of paper. In fact, it has one definite advantage - it can be interactive - and if implemented properly, this interactivity can lead to interactive fiction which in some respects far surpasses the level of immersion which can be obtained within purely one-dimensional stories.
Given the soaring cost of novels - typically at least ten pounds for a newly- published hardback book - you might well expect their interactive equivalent to cost substantially more, but this is simply not the case. Some absolutely superb pieces of work are available absolutely free, thanks to the generosity of their authors and their desire to have their work as widely distributed as possible. Adventures - as they are commonly called, since the aim of such an interactive piece of fiction is usually to explore the area in which it is set whilst solving puzzles in order to progress, and thus the player "adventures" through the landscape - also do not place massive demands on storage space, processor power, or required memory, usually fitting in as little as a few hundred kilobytes. As well as freely obtainable games, collections of some classic adventures can be bought within the restraints of even the most modest of budgets, and many of them can be played on any 32-bit Acorn computer without requiring a PC card or any kind of emulation.
Graham Nelson, who has recently started writing a column in Acorn User magazine, has written a truly excellent free compiler which produces adventure games in a standard format which can be run on any computer, given the presence of a suitable interpreter, and several are available for 32-bit Acorns. This means you can download a standard-format game from an FTP site somewhere on the internet - which is perfectly viable even for dial-up users given the small filesize of the games - and then run it on your own computer without having to worry about incompatibility issues. In fact, one of the interpreters we have access to on our platform is probably the best interpreter available on any platform, and we have Kevin Bracey, an Acorn Risc Technologies employee, to thank for that (although I should make clear that it is his private product, and nothing to do with ART).
Unfortunately there is more than one "standard" format, and it's only one of the "standard" formats that we can run - but fortunately it's perhaps the "best" one. Prolific, respected 1980s adventure game producer Infocom produced some superb games in their own native file format using a notional Z-code which could run on any computer, given a suitable interpreter which they sold with their games. Such games are referred to as being in "Z-code", "Infocom" or "Zip" format (the last of these not to be confused with a PC compression method of a similar name). It's these Z-code games which Graham Nelson's free compiler - called Inform - can produce. Since the compiler comes with libraries (supporting routines to make it easy to write adventure games) and a wonderful well-written and thorough manual Inform really does open up the creation of high-quality interactive fiction to the masses.
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