On: A QBasic Text Adventure Still Expanding in 2025

[ido]

Amazing dedication! QBasic was also my first taste of programming.

I wonder what you'd consider the tradeoffs of QBasic vs something intentionally geared towards IF, like Inform[0]?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform

[anthk → ido]

Inform6 would set these rooms in hours... Just create a Room class, which is something done in miliseconds (basically a room with a 'has light' atrribute), and being creating objects like crazy until the v8 Z-Machine gets exhausted (very difficult as it has been pumped up to great limits).

Also the game would run on PC's, Linux/BSD machines, DOS, Classic Macs, Amiga, Ataris, Android, IOS, OSX, RiscOS... everywhere from 16 bit and up.

[davidjhall → anthk]

Yes! According to this post, someone tried to find the max rooms in Inform 7 and stopped at tens of thousands. Took long to compile (not run) and used a lot of memory, but not an issue. https://intfiction.org/t/i7-realistic-max-number-of-rooms/99...

[anthk → davidjhall]

That's inform7, a different syntax than inform6, but in the end both compile against the same virtual machine. Still, inform6 OOP syntax with the English library it's like a really dumbed down Python more OOP than Python itself. Literally, as you are playing with objects in-game with literal attributes mapped 1:1 to the syntax. An enterable object in order to be that it must have the 'enterable' attribute defined in the object.