Short: GC: A Thrashing Parity Bit of the Mind Author: Carl de Marcken, David Baggett and Pearl Tsai Uploader: Bill Hoggett (mas supplies easynet co uk) Type: game/text Version: 0.1.1.2.3 Requires: TADS Run-Time v2.2+ Architecture: generic GC: A Thrashing Parity Bit of the Mind ====================================== ReadMe First. ====================================== Notes by Carl de Marcken, January 1993: GC is a text-adventure game written for the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Olympics, a competition held between four teams of about 40 people each, mostly graduate students, professors, and secretarial staff, over a two-week long period every January. The text adventure was only one event out of about 20. It was scored by time essentially- the first team to complete the game won, the last team lost. The game ended up being very popular, and kept a great number of people from performing any work at all over about an 80 hour time stretch. It also inspired a lot of cooperative effort. The game was popular not just because it has some good puzzles, but also because it created a world replete with humorous and interesting references to Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics and Physics, and the people of the MIT AI Lab. Because of this the game is not likely to be nearly so enjoyable for others who have no relation to the MIT AI Lab or any of these fields. But it is not entirely MIT-specific. A very few changes would make the game fun for almost any other university Computer Science department, for instance. The game is quite difficult, and not necessarily a good game for individual play. It was designed to be played by a team - during actual competition each team had an average of about 8 people working hard at it. For those familiar with TADS, the game requires the allocation of an unusually large amount of heap memory and memory for the symbol table, and plays slowly on low power machines. ====================================== Notes by Neil K., January 25, 1993: This zip file contains the source for the TADS text adventure GC: A Thrashing Parity Bit of the Mind, written by Carl de Marcken, David Baggett and Pearl Tsai from MIT. TADS stands for the Text Adventure Development System, which is a shareware system for designing text adventures, written by Michael J. Roberts. You really need a copy of TADS - available at ftp.gmd.de and many other fine ftp sites - to make use of this source code. The original distribution of the GC source was a compressed tar archive. This file was packed into zip format for uploading to the if-archive at ftp.gmd.de by Neil K. (n_k_guy@sfu.ca) with permission from the authors. Some filenames are different from the original distribution as many users of the if-archive have DOS machines. Unfortunately DOS is saddled with an irritating 8 + 3 character uppercase-only filename convention, so I had to rename some files to accommodate DOS and Windows users. Hopefully this change won't inconvenience the rest of us. This file was placed in the if-archive TADS example source code collection as it's a very interesting example of some of the capabilities of TADS. As noted above however, GC is not an easy game to play, particularly by those who don't have inside knowledge of MIT culture and some of the fields of study popular in the MIT AI lab. In addition it was written over a brief period of time and was not written with beginning TADS users in mind. Thus the code is neither highly optimized nor heavily commented. Users just starting out in TADS programming may find it difficult to understand in places and should probably begin with something more thoroughly documented, such as Dave Baggett's source for Colossal Cave Revisited, which is also available on ftp.gmd.de in the directory /if-archive/games/source/tads. However advanced TADS users will find GC's ingenious code fascinating. Finally, the original distribution contained a copy of the final compiled binary game (.gam) file ready to play along with a series of scanned colour images from the original GC manual. These were removed for space considerations. However the playable .gam file of this game is also available from ftp.gmd.de in the directory /if-archive/games/tads, so users who want to play the game without compiling it can simply pick up a copy of a TADS interpreter that runs on their system and play it! ====================================== Contents: This archive contains the following files: readme.1st The file you are reading. This is a modified version of the "README" file included with the original distribution. readme.mit A file the MIT AI Lab teams got, describing the scoring system used and how to play the game. This file was called "Readme" in the original distribution. announce A promotional message sent out about the game. This file was called "announcement" in the original distribution. notes.mit A list of things that may need to be made known or changed for the game to be played outside of the MIT AI Laboratory. This file was named "mit-specific" in the original distribution. instruct.mit Some information for people who have never played text adventures before. This file was named "our-instructions" in the original distribution. instruct.tad More information for people who have never played text adventures before, or who are unfamiliar with TADS. This file was named "tads-instructions" in the original. welcome Some text from the game's brochure/manual, as distributed to AI Lab players. src/ A directory containing the following files: src/makefile A makefile for the game for users of UNIX versions of TADS. src/adv.t The standard TADS adventure definitions; modified for use with GC. src/classes.t GC's custom object classes. src/game.t Most of the game's locations and objects. src/messages.t The messages spoken by the game's various non-player characters. (NPCs.) src/gctest.t The #include directives for compiling a non-release version of GC which includes testing verbs for debugging purposes. src/npc.t Basic code for the class of NPC objects. src/people.t The actual NPCs in the game. src/gc.t The #include directives for compiling a release version of GC. src/std.t Standard definitions for TADS; modified for use with GC. src/tavern.t The code making up the Cheez Boar Inn. src/testverbs.t Custom GC testing verbs for debugging purposes. src/verbs.t Custom GC verbs. ====================================== Compilation Notes: To compile GC you need the latest version of the TADS compiler - 2.1 or later. The full package is available from many shareware distribution sites. Check the directory /if-archive/programming/tads on ftp.gmd.de for the latest TADS packages for a variety of different operating systems. If you're running TADS under the UNIX operating system you can take advantage of the included makefile, which contains two different kinds of makes. > make production should be used for creating a release version of the game. > make makes a version that includes test verbs and debugging information. If you're not running TADS under UNIX you should compile either the file "gc.t" if you want the release version of the game or compile the file "gctest.t" if you want the test verb version of the game. Make sure that the other source code files - all the files that end with .t - are in the same directory as gc.t or gctest.t, or that the compiler knows where to find them! When you compile you need to set some memory options as mentioned in the makefile. These are -mh65535 -mp32000 -ml 32000. If you're using the Macintosh version of TADS you'll have to set these memory options by bringing up the appropriate dialogue box; consult your TADS manual for details. (-mh sets the heap size, -mp sets the parse node pool size and -ml sets the local symbol table size.) You're also heartily encouraged to support shareware and register your copy of TADS with High Energy Software if you haven't already. In return you'll get both a feeling of tremendous satisfaction at having done such a noble deed and a fine manual documenting TADS to its fullest.