Don's account of differences from the original.

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Eric S. Raymond 2017-05-30 17:47:26 -04:00
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@ -66,6 +66,46 @@ contained a rights reservation by Don Woods and that was it.
I wrote to Don asking permission to release 2.5 under 2-clause BSD;
he replied on 15 May giving both permission and encouragement.
Here is what Don said about differences between the original Adventure
and 2.5:
> The bulk of the points come from five new 16-point treasures. (I say "bulk"
> because I think at least one of the scores included some padding and I may
> have tweaked those.) Each of the new treasures requires solving a puzzle
> that's definitely at the tricky end of the scale for Adventure. Much of the
> new stuff involves trying new directions and/or finding new uses for stuff
> that already existed; e.g. the forest outside is no longer a small number of
> locations with partially random movement, but is a full-fledged maze, one
> that I hope has a character different from either of the previous two.
>
> As the text itself says, V2.5 is essentially the same as V2, with a few more
> hints. (I think I came up with a better one for the endgame, too.) I don't
> seem to have a copy of the similar text from V2, so I don't know whether/how
> it described itself to new and seasoned players.
>
> The other big change, as I mentioned above, was I added a way of docking
> points at a certain number of turns. This was my second attempt to do what
> the batteries had been for: require being efficient to achieve top score.
> Alas, the batteries led to players deliberately turning the lamp off/on
> whenever they weren't moving or were in a lit area, making the game take
> even longer! I set the requirement at what felt like a hard but fair
> number of turns, then applied several sneaky tricks to shave off another
> twenty.
>
> I hacked up a wrapper around the game (still in Fortran, most likely, but
> I forget) that would try each initializing the RNG using each second of a
> given day, while feeding in a script that either worked or aborted early
> if anything went wrong (such as a dwarf blocking my path). As I recall,
> it took less than a day's worth of RNG seeds to find one that worked.
>
> I verified my script could work given a favorable RNG, and stuck
> that number in the message.
>
> I like how that final puzzle, unlike the game itself, does not readily
> succumb even given access to the game source. You really need to fit
> together not only the goals and the map and use of inventory space, but
> also details like just what _can_ you do in the dark...?
== Nomenclature ==
This project is called "Open Adventure" because it's not at all clear