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A Change In The Weather
''A Change in the Weather'' is a 1995 interactive fiction (IF) video game. Developed by Andrew Plotkin, the game is written in version five of the Inform programming language, and compiled for the Z-machine, a virtual machine that allows interactive fiction to be played on a variety of platforms. On June 24, 2014, Plotkin shared ''A Change in the Weather'' source code for "personal, educational use only." The game tied for first place in the Inform category of the 1995 Interactive Fiction Competition. As one of six IF games recommended by ''CU Amiga'' in 1998, Jason Compton called ''A Change in the Weather'' "Very, very hard, it challenges IF conventions and makes you think (and save your game) quite a lot." Interactive fiction scholar Nick Montfort called it "remarkable ... for its attempts to integrate the typical sorts of adventure-game puzzles with the description of landscape, the simulation of an animal character, and the emotional situation of the 'adventurer' player char ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Interactive Fiction
'' Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of interactive narratives or interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be " text-only", however, graphical text adventures still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles. Due to their text-only nature, they sidestepped the problem of writing for widely divergent graphics architectures. This feature meant that i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
CU Amiga
''Commodore User'', known to the readers as the abbreviated ''CU'', was one of the oldest British Commodore magazines. With a publishing history spanning over 15 years, it mixed content with technical and video game features. Incorporating ''Vic Computing'' in 1983 by publishers EMAP, the magazine's focus moved to the emerging Commodore 64, before introducing Amiga coverage in 1986, paving the way for Amiga's dominance and a title change to ''CU Amiga'' in 1990. Covering the 16-bit computer, the magazine continued for another eight years until the last issue was published in October 1998 when EMAP opted to close the magazine due to falling sales and a change in focus for EMAP. The magazine also reviewed arcade games. Timeline Carrying on from where ''Vic Computing'' left, ''Commodore User'' was launched in October 1983, with an initial preview issue in June. Initially the magazine contained what was referred to as the serious side of computing, with programming tutorials, machine ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Video Games With Available Source Code
Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) systems which, in turn, were replaced by flat panel displays of several types. Video systems vary in display resolution, aspect ratio, refresh rate, color capabilities and other qualities. Analog and digital variants exist and can be carried on a variety of media, including radio broadcast, magnetic tape, optical discs, computer files, and network streaming. History Analog video Video technology was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) television systems, but several new technologies for video display devices have since been invented. Video was originally exclusively a live technology. Charles Ginsburg led an Ampex research team developing one of the first practical video ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation
The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF) is a nonprofit charitable organization founded in June 2016 working to maintain, improve, and preserve tools and services used in the creation and distribution of interactive fiction. Activities Since 2016, IFTF operates the Interactive Fiction Competition (IFComp), an annual competition for new works from independent creators which has been running since 1995. Since 2017, IFTF operates the Interactive Fiction Archive (IF Archive), an archive preserving the history of interactive fiction which has been operating since 1992. The IF Archive contains websites and documents valuable to the IF community, including the "Inform 6" website and standards such as "the Treaty of Babel",, the Z-machine, and its successor Glulx. Since 2019, IFTF supports the Interactive Fiction Community Forum (IntFiction) at intfiction.org, which has served as a center for interactive fiction community discussion since 2006. Since 2021, IFTF operates th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Emily Short
Emily Short is an interactive fiction (IF) writer. She is perhaps best known for her debut game ''Galatea'' and her use of psychologically complex non-player characters (NPCs). Short has been called "a visionary in the world of text-based games for years," and is the author of over forty works of IF in addition to being chief editor of the IF Theory Book. She wrote a regular column on interactive fiction (IF) for ''Rock, Paper, Shotgun''. Career In June 2011, Emily Short, with Richard Evans, co-founded Little TextPeople, which explored the emotional possibilities of interactive fiction. It was acquired in early 2012 by Linden Lab. In 2014, Short was let go by Linden Lab, ending the project she was working on, Versu. In September 2016, Short was hired by Spirit AI, a roughly 15 person company working on machine learning and natural language processing. She joined its board of directors in 2018, and was later named Chief Product Officer. In January 2020, Short joined the 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ascential
Ascential plc, formerly EMAP, is a British business-to-business media business specialising in exhibitions & festivals and information services. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index. History Richard Winfrey purchased the ''Spalding Guardian'' in 1887 and later purchased the ''Lynn News'' and the '' Peterborough Advertiser''; he also started the ''North Cambs Echo''. He became a Liberal politician and campaigner for agricultural rights and the papers were used to promote his political views in and around Spalding, Boston, Sleaford and Peterborough. During World War II Winfrey's newspaper interests began to be passed over to his son, Richard Pattinson Winfrey (1902–1985). In 1947, under the direction of 'Pat' Winfrey, the family's newspaper titles were consolidated to form the East Midland Allied Press (EMAP): this was achieved by the merger of the Northamptonshire Printing and Publishing Co., the Peterborough Advertiser Co., the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frotz
The Z-machine is a virtual machine that was developed by Joel Berez and Marc Blank in 1979 and used by Infocom for its text adventure games. Infocom compiled game code to files containing Z-machine instructions (called story files or Z-code files) and could therefore port its text adventures to a new platform simply by writing a Z-machine implementation for that platform. With the large number of incompatible home computer systems in use at the time, this was an important advantage over using native code or developing a compiler for each system. History The "Z" of Z-machine stands for Zork, Infocom's first adventure game. Z-code files usually have names ending in .z1, .z2, .z3, .z4, .z5, .z6, .z7, or .z8, where the number is the version number of the Z-machine on which the file is intended to be run, as given by the first byte of the story file. This is a modern convention, however. Infocom itself used extensions of .dat (Data) and .zip (ZIP = Z-machine Interpreter Program), ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nick Montfort
Nick Montfort is a poet and professor of digital media at MIT, where he directs a lab called The Trope Tank. He also holds a part-time position at the University of Bergen where he leads a node on computational narrative systems at the Center for Digital Narrative. Among his publications are seven books of computer-generated literature and six books from the MIT Press, several of which are collaborations. His work also includes digital projects, many of them in the form of short programs. He lives in New York City. Computer-generated books Montfort's ''The Truelist'' (Counterpath, 2017) is a computer-generated book-length poem produced by a one-page computer program. The code is included at the end of the book. Montfort has also done a complete studio recording reading ''The Truelist,'' available at PennSound. Among Montfort's computer-generated books is ''#!'' (pronounced "shebang"), in which he "chooses the programming languages Python, Ruby, and Perl (the last of which has ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Interactive Fiction Competition
The Interactive Fiction Competition (also known as IFComp) is one of several annual competitions for works of interactive fiction. It has been held since 1995. It is intended for fairly short games, as judges are only allowed to spend two hours playing a game before deciding how many points to award it. The competition has been described as the " Super Bowl" of interactive fiction. Since 2016 it is operated by the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF). Organization In 2016, operation of the competition was taken over by thInteractive Fiction Technology Foundation The lead organizer 2014-2017 was Jason McIntosh, and in 2018 it was Jacqueline Ashwell. Categories Although the first competition had separate sections for Inform and TADS games, subsequent competitions have not been divided into sections and are open to games produced by any method, provided that the software used to play the game is freely available. In addition to the main competition, the entries tak ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Andrew Plotkin
Andrew Plotkin (born May 15, 1970), also known as Zarf, is a central figure in the modern interactive fiction (IF) community. Having both written a number of award-winning games and developed a range of new file formats, interpreters, and other utilities for the design, production, and running of IF games, Plotkin is widely recognised for both his creative and his technical contributions to the homebrew IF scene. Interactive fiction Plotkin was one of the earliest writers to use Graham Nelson's Inform development system, and one of the first since Infocom's heyday to explore the boundaries of interactive fiction as an artistic medium. Many later authors cite him as a primary influence. He has won many awards within the community, and is frequently interviewed for magazine articles about interactive fiction. Plotkin has also made major technical contributions to the interactive fiction medium, designing the Blorb archive format, the Glk I/O platform, and the Glulx virtual mach ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Source Code
In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source code. The source code is often transformed by an assembler or compiler into binary machine code that can be executed by the computer. The machine code is then available for execution at a later time. Most application software is distributed in a form that includes only executable files. If the source code were included it would be useful to a user, programmer or a system administrator, any of whom might wish to study or modify the program. Alternatively, depending on the technology being used, source code may be interpreted and executed directly. Definitions Richard Stallman's definition, formulated in his 1989 seminal li ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
