parchment VS RPI-Engine

This is a fun one I played recently about shopping in a grocery store, called Aisle. You only have a single command you can give for the whole game, but there's a looot of them you can provide, and it gives you a different ending for each. Part of the fun is trying to figure out what you can say to find another ending. You can play it directly at the link below.

Play: https://iplayif.com/?story=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ifarchive.org%2F...

Paste any of those URLs into https://iplayif.com for a modern web interpreter.

it's a mobile browser based on chrome and while I don't use it for this, I find it acceptable enough, actually better than the mobile chrome in my phone for some things, like https://iplayif.com/ which runs much better on it thanks to a generous virtual screen than on small screen sharing space with a virtual keyboard...

This article is interesting as it seems "the long way around": the Z-Machine is rather well documented, and already has VMs for the web [1] and going to the ZIL source to build a port of the ZIL itself rather than to interpret the Z-Machine binary is cool, I suppose, but ignores decades of insights into the Z-Machine.

While I'm being a downer, also need to point out that while the Internet Archive has archived the ZIL source code the Zork games are still under copyright and owned by Activision Blizzard (soon/now Microsoft). Using Zork itself as a deployment artifact is a possible way to get sued even if you think the game "abandonware".

[1] The best known/maintained is Parchment: https://github.com/curiousdannii/parchment

Are you using the latest version of Parchment? The version that ships with the official I7 packages is very old. Updating might address your issue, but I don't know.

I would strongly strongly suggest investigating MUDs if that's your bag. They're non-graphical so they can be built and maintained by small numbers of people with low programming skills and they tend to be almost entirely about community experiences. I'll just leave http://www.middle-earth.us/ here because it's where I met my now SO and it's an absolutely wonderful community - but there are hundreds of them out there. They do take a serious time commitment though, since they're all about building up that interesting social world.

MUDs are a class of game that is terribly underrated. I've played on a few different one (mostly toward the RP focused end of things) but I think the whole family of games shows just how effective imagination can be when coupled solely with text descriptions.

I have extremely strong memories from Shadows of Isildur[1] and met my spouse there!

1. http://www.middle-earth.us/

A MUD I worked (uh volunteered, as a total newbie) on had a soft-reboot implementation for deploys that blew my mind when I first saw it in action. Open telnet connections were all sent keep alives before the MUD launched a new instance of itself from the executable (which may have been a different version from the currently running copy) and then killed itself. To users on the other end a message appeared saying "Relaunching the server" and was followed up shortly by "You may now resume play". Since this engine was designed to constantly fall over due to instabilities and OOMs it stored the current game state in a persistent state (originally on-disk files - most of it was migrated to MySQL) so the only things that really needed hacking were re-acquiring the right sockets and remembering which user is which.

This included, FYI, under development new game elements which were mostly written and launched using a mix of things called RPROGs, OPROGs, CPROGs and Descs (among other things) all of which were written in a custom domain language input into the MUD itself - devs like myself worked only on underlying mechanics and had no need to wander into the specifics of all those triggers.

This probably opened up a number of security holes but, given that the game only ever checked the first six characters of a password (and checked them one by one against a plaintext copy) there were lower fruit available to criticize.

If you want to check it out an older copy is available open-sourced[1] - it's a DIKU variant MUD.

1. https://github.com/webbj74/RPI-Engine