
Your load is too heavy: Zork deep reading - panic
http://blog.zarfhome.com/2017/08/your-load-is-too-heavy-zork-deep-reading.html
======
kmill
A while back I made a partial emulator for Z5 (a version of the virtual
machine Infocom games ran on) that recompiled the game dynamically to
Javascript[1], and I remember while pouring over the dumps coming across the
fact "You're holding too many things already!" depended by a random number. I
never checked whether it could actually fire, though! I assumed it was
vestigial, with the "Your load is too heavy" message in the same function.

Another quirk I came across was how in the Canyon View, on many emulators when
you "climb down" you are greeted with "The xc ec knwall munz doesn't lead
downward." It turns out the Solid Gold edition has no name for the "down"
object, which probably didn't exist in earlier versions, and emulators don't
tend to check the text length field for the object (0 in this case) because
the string encoding uses something like null-termination. Text is encoded in
5-bit blocks, explaining how the random data stays within the alphabet.
Whatever emulators do, it's still a bug in the game.

[1] It was an excuse to figure out how to make an Emscripten-like relooper, to
figure out how to simulate blocking calls ("continuations") using exceptions,
and to learn about the design of the Z-machine.

Edit: I guess I should mention for the "xc ec knwall munz" quirk that the
directions are all objects, and "climb" is meant for ropes and stairs. I
believe what is happening is that you can go down in the Canyon view, but
"down" isn't the vehicle which will carry you there.

~~~
duskwuff
Infocom's games handled compass directions strangely -- they were treated like
omnipresent objects. In some versions of Zork, you could give a direction
(like "east") to a hungry troll, who would proceed to eat it.

This, among many other bizarre bugs, is documented at:
[http://graeme.50webs.com/infobugs/zork1.htm](http://graeme.50webs.com/infobugs/zork1.htm)

~~~
wolfgang42
Directions-as-objects seems to be a common pattern. LambdaCore does the same
thing, though LambdaMOO later added a Generic Detailed Room with basic support
for directions, so a separate object wasn't required. (Anything more
sophisticated than "go west" still requires a separate door object.)

In addition to missing checks causing unexpected interactions, this approach
also has the problem that the two ends can become asymmetrical, causing
confusion (though this may be desired e.g. in the case of a trap-door). In the
case of LambdaMOO, there's an entry northwest from the living room to the
kitchen, but no corresponding entry southeast in the other direction!

~~~
jandrese
Asymmetrical navigation was definitely used as a game element. "You are in a
maze of twisty passages, all alike".

------
criddell
When I was a teenager, I loved the Infocom games. I actually called a tip line
once or twice to get unstuck. I would spend hours playing through, taking
notes, and mapping my progress. I also loved stuff that came in the boxes. It
has a similar nostalgia pull that I think some people get from vinyl records.

When the BBC put the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy online [1], I loaded it
up and went to work. Then I quit after about 15 minutes. I'd love to watch my
14 year old self working his way through that game. Did I have better focus?
Did I have fewer things to spend my time on? Why was it so captivating then?
It seems almost arduous today.

Have you played an Infocom game after a 30 year break? How did it go for you?

[1]:
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN2...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN2PLZG/the-
hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-game-30th-anniversary-edition)

~~~
jsnell
I played through _Deadline_ recently, as part of a project to play through a
bunch of detective games. The last time I'd tried it was in the late '90s (so
not quite a 30 year break, but still substantial), and at the time I could
literally make no progress at all. This time around it went a lot more
smoothly; except for one particularly unfair bit that I had to eventually look
up, it felt like the there was tangible progress at regular intervals.

But Deadline is maybe a special case; it's not really a game of traditional
adventure game puzzles using wacky dream logic. It's one half figuring out
exactly what made each of the NPCs tick and manipulating them into doing
things that advanced the plot, and one half doing mundane investigative work.

It also has one of the most brilliant uses of a text parser ever. When
interacting with a certain item in the house, you're naturally going to use a
specific verb. This will just give you a bland and generic result. But if the
player has discovered a specific bit of evidence and realized what it implies
about the crime, it's obvious that you could use another verb on that object
to verify the hunch. It's also not a verb you'd ever just randomly use on an
item, so even people trying to brute-force their way through the game would
miss it. It ends up as a really cool way of making sure that it's the player
rather than the character solving the crime, and something that would be very
hard to replicate in a graphical adventure game.

~~~
ballenf
I grew up on King's Quest and its ilk which were similarly "hardened" against
blind clicking that became common in later games of the genre. I don't think
I'd have the patience to solve KQ1 from scratch today.

Anyway, I too have a fond memory of text parsers in games, graphical or not.

Sierra's maybe weren't the best with some maddening quirks where certain word
orders wouldn't work and the responses were nonsense. Sentences that had
direct and indirect objects were frequently problematic: "give the mouse the
cheese" would result in "you aren't carrying the mouse". I should probably
blame my pre-teen english for the frustration however. Infocom games were
smarter, as I recall.

KQ1's puzzle requiring writing the alphabet forwards and backwards and
encoding the name "rumplestiltskin"... have to admit I never figured that out
on my own. They dumbed down that in the VGA (and all later) releases accepting
the name simply spelled backwards.

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afro88
Honestly, this is actually kind of neat. I mean, if I'm carrying too many
things in real life, I will probably not be able to pick something else up.
But if I try again a few times I may be able to fit it or grasp it somehow.
The probability of this working decreases depending on the number of items
over my "easy to carry" limit. That's a cool detail.

~~~
WovenTales
Definitely, though the Zork 3 message still sounds like such a better way of
letting you know what's happening.

------
sethammons
One of my favorite memories of zork, after giving up once, was something very
similar to:

Kill self

> With what?

Self

> You don't have the you.

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cyberferret
Amazing! All those times I went adventuring carrying too little... I should
have just tried 'take x' again! There is a type of ironic zen lesson in all of
this somewhere...

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lobster_johnson
While I've always loved the Infocom games, I was partial to Magnetic Scrolls:
The Pawn, Guild of Thieves, Jinxter and so on.

Magnetic Scrolls games came with a little bit of graphics (or, in the case of
the later Wonderland game, a whole graphics environment, including a visual
inventory you could drag stuff around in), and also had a more sophisticated
parser. For example, if you had a green bottle and a brown bottle you could do
something like:

    
    
        > put water in bottle
        Which bottle?
        > green
        The green bottle is now filled with water.
    

This also worked with modifiers in-sentence ("put water in the blue bottle"),
and it could handle complex sentences like: "go southeast and get the
harmonica and the bottle and then get the knife that is on the table and use
the knife to cut the sandwich".

The internal data model was also more abstract, and therefore more flexible.
For example [1], if you needed to cut something, you could use anything that
was sharp enough, because the data model didn't require a specific object. If
you had a knife, you could cut a rope, but if you also had a vase, you could
break the vase, then use one of the shards to cut the rope with.

All the Magnetic Scrolls games are playable today on many platforms through
Magnetic [2], and you can find the files online. The original Magnetic Scrolls
developers were able to recover the old source code from tapes [3] and will be
remastering the other games, and releasing the code. A remastered version [4]
of The Pawn came out recently for multiple platforms, including mobile.

[1] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/4760332/In-my-
opinion-...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/4760332/In-my-opinion-What-
are-you-made-of.html)

[2] [http://msmemorial.if-legends.org/magnetic.php](http://msmemorial.if-
legends.org/magnetic.php)

[3] [https://strandgames.com/blog/magnetic-scrolls-games-
source-c...](https://strandgames.com/blog/magnetic-scrolls-games-source-code-
recovered)

[4]
[https://strandgames.com/games/thePawn](https://strandgames.com/games/thePawn)

~~~
svachalek
Ah, I'd forgotten about those. I saw the ads as a kid and was interested but
never got a chance to play any of them. This does remind me of The Hobbit,
though, which seems to have some similar features:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_(1982_video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_\(1982_video_game\))

~~~
lobster_johnson
They're similar. The Hobbit was simpler from a parser perspective. But it had
music. It also had the added feature that all the art was vector graphics [1],
and it drew the vectors slowly as you were watching. (The graphics models on
computers like C64 were limited in the ways colours could be placed next to
each other, so while the drawings are beautiful, they also look a little
wonky.)

[1] [https://youtu.be/3z64d56p7Lw?t=44](https://youtu.be/3z64d56p7Lw?t=44)

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hoodoof
Zork is smarter than Siri.

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radnor
Obligatory link to the Eaten By A Grue podcast, where the hosts play old
Infocom games and talk about them. The first podcast is, of course, Zork.

[http://monsterfeet.com/grue/](http://monsterfeet.com/grue/)

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oldpond
I played this on the mainframe in the early 90's while mounting tapes on the
night shift. It was hard. I cheated. I looked at the source code for the key
to get out of the twisty little maze. Wonderful stuff.

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jonasmst
Off topic, but the way the mobile version of this site steals left- and right
swipes makes a terrible UX.

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megamindbrian
Proof looking at code makes things less fun?

