Text Adventures would be cool - any?

[Quaddy]

i love those old school text adventures, you remember right? - well if you are under 30 then maybe not - i remember as soon as the teacher in the computer class would go out, we would load up 'mansion' on the old acorns and bbc's and proceed to navigate round the house and steal goodies, like: "to your north you see a pantry door half open, press N to enter" or "to your south you see a small black cat carrying a strange object, press S to visit the cat" lol - or something similar, these text adventures could be really absorbing and i for one would LOVE to see a plugin to allow a selection of these to be loaded into the Rockbox plugins system.

[Llorean]

The forum is not the appropriate place for feature requests.

Your best bet is to find an open source interpreter for the text adventures you like (many used interpreted languages) and find out if it's feasible to port. I can't imagine playing a game that requires large amounts of typing on a DAP, but either way requests don't belong here.

[GodEater]

There's no plugin for this at the moment - but there are a number of open source implementations of interpreters for Zork and games published in a similar format. If you're interested in this then it might be worth looking into how complicated it would be to port them to rockbox.

Bear in mind that the text entry is going to *painful* to say the least though!

[LambdaCalculus]

Hey, I'm 28 but I played plenty of text adventures in my day!  

But seriously, GodEater and Llorean are right: text entry on a DAP will be a nightmare. A simpler game would be a far better idea.

[Quaddy]

The forum is not the appropriate place for feature requests.

Your best bet is to find an open source interpreter for the text adventures you like (many used interpreted languages) and find out if it's feasible to port. I can't imagine playing a game that requires large amounts of typing on a DAP, but either way requests don't belong here.

Sry, it wasnt a feature request, more like a "anyone know of anything like this for a dap" type post. but i apologize anyway.

i have entered this as an official feature request FYI.

and there is NO 'typing' involved. just scroll up or down or what have you, to select your orientaion, N,E,S,W or L,R,U,D etc etc.

[GodEater]

Thinking about it - the old LucasArts adventure games (Day of the Tentacle, Sam 'n' Max Hit the Road, Monkey Island, etc.) *might* be doable on some of the colour DAPS.

There'd be no typing involved there, and again, there's already an open source interpreter out there....

and there is NO 'typing' involved. just scroll up or down or what have you, to select your orientaion, N,E,S,W or L,R,U,D etc etc.

That would take care of the movement - but how about the enourmous long strings you have to type in Zork to do anything other than move:

'put the blue gem on the statue with the gold mask'

or similar?

[Llorean]

Actually, every SCUMM game with the exception of Monkey Island 3 was 320x240 or less, and should be at least playable at half that (or by use of a scrolling zoomed image when necessary for precision). So, absolutely doable on Gigabeat and iPod 5G, and earlier games at least definitely doable on other targets, possibly all of the games (except MI3). Since in the SCUMM games it was impossible to die (with the exception of Monkey Island 1, afaik) the fact that input speed is going to be hindered isn't a problem.

The biggest problem is that the current open source interpreter for SCUMM is heavily object oriented C++ if I understand correctly.

[GodEater]

The biggest problem is that the current open source interpreter for SCUMM is heavily object oriented C++ if I understand correctly.

Ouch.

[Quaddy]

[/quote]
but how about the enourmous long strings you have to type in Zork to do anything other than move:

'put the blue gem on the statue with the gold mask'

or similar?
[/quote]

Wow - monkey island, i had forgotten about that! nice one for bringing it back into the minds eye, god i loved those types of games, great atmosphere (discworld?) heh!

you are right, i havent played zork, so i am not able to comment, i take your point for games that would indeed require laborious text input, but a lot were even simpler! just navigating and stuff, hmmm... wonder if you would be able to save your progress too...

[LambdaCalculus]

The biggest problem is that the current open source interpreter for SCUMM is heavily object oriented C++ if I understand correctly.

Indeed, it's mostly C++. Drove me nuts just looking at the source; it's like different dialects of Spanish for me.

I had suggested on the Feature Requests some time back that a nice simple game, like Hunt the Wumpus, would be more in the style of a DAP game. If anyone remembers the TI-99/A version, with its easy-on-the-eyes graphics and simple controls (up, down, left, right, shoot), this would make a wonderful addition to Rockbox, and would work on nearly all supported players, including greyscale DAPs.

Right now, the best I can do is just gather information and see how feasable a port is. This isn't a feature request... I'm going to do this job myself.