🚀 go-pugleaf

amitp@owlnet.rice.edu (Amit J Patel) says:
+I'd like to also recommend ADVSYS (which Josh mentioned), which is the
+"best darn adventure system I've ever seen" (and I have seen TADS).  ;)
+Of course, "best" is subjective, so I won't say TADS is worse than ADVSYS.
+They're probably equal in power, and it may just be a personal preference.
+
+There is an Amiga version at:
+
+        gatekeeper.dec.com
+        /.2/micro/amiga/fish/f0/ff087/AdvSys.zoo
+
+and an IBM-PC version at:
+
+        procyon.cis.ksu.edu
+        /pub/PC/Games/Misc/advsys.arc
+

and an OS9 version, I'd like to add! Haven't sent it to any archive site
yet since I haven't figured out how to do that yet.

+[or at least Archie tells me they're there...]
+
+"ADVSYS is a Lisp-like object-oriented language, which has a

That explains why I had a devil of a time understanding it.

+source-code #include file that defines everything having to do with
+adventures, so you can change everything."  :) ADVSYS also comes with
+C source so that you can mess with it --- you can tweak it so that if
+your adventure is REALLY REALLY huge, you can change it so that it
+works under a DOS-extender to run in many megabytes.  (Or at least it
+seems possible...)
+
+What probably keeps most people away from it is the lisp syntax, but
+that also keeps the interpreter down to 20k (or Josh's version down to
+12[??]k).  David Betz, the author of ADVSYS, also wrote the XScheme and
+XLisp compilers, and he used the same byte-compilation techniques in
+ADVSYS.
+
+I think that ADVSYS is crippled because it doesn't have first-class
+procedures, symbol manipulation, and lists.  It is Lisp brought down
+to the restrictions of Pascal.  :( I'd rather be using the Real Thing
+(Scheme).  :)

Hey, it's difficult enough trying to follow the "logic" without all
those extras. 8-) Perhaps, if you wouldn't mind, you could write a
quick tutorial on how to augment the sample files. That way we who
are not well versed in LISP can get a better grasp on some of the
complexities of ADVSYS. Writing the adventure source data is not bad,
but those methods, verbs, classes, etc. are not intuitively obvious!

-- 
Thomas Kocourek  KD4CIK                       :UUCP on an OS9 system,
UUCP: ...!{emory,gatech}!wa4mei!westgac3!tomk :Multitasking & windows in
INTERNET tomk@westgac3                        :512KBytes - All in a COCO3!