parchment VS inform7-ide

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.

For those looking for Linux packages instead of compiling themselves, there's a github build project of an earlier version this year https://github.com/ptomato/inform7-ide/actions/runs/19915523...

Inform 7 is a domain-specific language for creating parser-based works of interactive fiction (i.e. old-school "text adventure games"). It does the heavy lifting of parsing and maintaining the consistency of the world model for the programmer.

Inform 7 takes this to the extreme, allowing code such as "A distance is a kind of value. 5 miles specifies a distance."

Pure parser-based games have become niche, but they are still out there and, like others mentioned, have continued to evolve (see Inform 7). You no longer have to "guess the verb".

Neat. Have you ever seen Inform? http://inform7.com/ Might offer some inspiration on future features. It's a pretty cool language that's been around for a long time and has the same use case.