creating a text adventure, but with what programming language?

[runequester]

My big goal this year is to write a text adventure game for the amiga. No graphics probably but definately some tracker tunes.
 
Now the real question is... whats the easiest language to use?
 
Amos looks pretty straight forward, and I remember messing with basic on the c64 for text adventures. It also seems it will handle music files and such pretty easily.
 
Any other options to consider?
Any significant advantages of amos pro instead?
 
Any trouble to expect running on 3.1 kickstart?

[ChaosLord]

True BASIC has the absolute best string handling of any language ever.

What is a text adventure program?  A program that handles strings.

I used to do text adventure coding back in the olden days.  I wrote a really awesome parser.  A friend wrote the descriptions for the rooms and objects.

Good luck.

[EDanaII]

You might look into TADS for the Amiga:
http://aminet.net/package/game/role/TADS3018

More (non Amiga) info may be found here:
http://www.tads.org/

[runequester]

Thanks for teh recommendation. I'll definately check that out. I kinda want to do this in a proper programming language though, as I want to build out into other games as well later in a million years

[EDanaII]

Well, if you're gonna "do it right" -- my humble opinion, of course -- then I'd use an object-oriented language. You will be managing objects in the game.

C++ or Amiga E are probably your best bets.

Two cents...

[rockersuke]

I wrote 2 short text adventures last year with AMOS Pro and I'm halfway to finish a third. I feel rather comfortable with AMOS for this task, but in fact any BASIC dialect will do.

There are a handful of PD amiga specific text-adventure writting tools (C.A.G., ADMS) and some commercial soft (Aegis Visionary) among others. Handy if you're not fluent in any native programming lang, but doing it on your own is always a more versatile option.

Spacejest, Battleforce the Adventure Game, Box, are just the first examples I can remember of AMOS written text-advs. I'm currently making a catalogue of Amiga specific Interactive Fiction tools and games for a personnal project of mine. Hope your adventure will be at least mentioned in it some day!

@Chaoslord

Which is that text-adventure you wrote? Perhaps I've already seen it but didn't know you were the author, or maybe I wasn't aware at all of it. Tell us about it!

[runequester]

I wrote 2 short text adventures last year with AMOS Pro and I'm halfway to finish a third. I feel rather comfortable with AMOS for this task, but in fact any BASIC dialect will do.
 
There are a handful of PD amiga specific text-adventure writting tools (C.A.G., ADMS) and some commercial soft (Aegis Visionary) among others. Handy if you're not fluent in any native programming lang, but doing it on your own is always a more versatile option.
 
Spacejest, Battleforce the Adventure Game, Box, are just the first examples I can remember of AMOS written text-advs. I'm currently making a catalogue of Amiga specific Interactive Fiction tools and games for a personnal project of mine. Hope your adventure will be at least mentioned in it some day!
 
@Chaoslord
 
Which is that text-adventure you wrote? Perhaps I've already seen it but didn't know you were the author, or maybe I wasn't aware at all of it. Tell us about it!

In the future, I'd like to do a tile based game like Hilt, so I figure this will be a good starting point.
 
Do you have opinion on the different versions of amos (normal, easy, pro) and what to go with?
 
Thanks for the encouragement!

[tone007]

I did a small one in C once.

[fishy_fiz]

For something like a text adventure the language used isnt hugely important, just use what you're confortable with. It sounds as though youre leaning towards some form of AMOS, which will do the job nicely. As for which AMOS, I'd go for AMOS Pro without question. It's the most updated and most system friendly AMOS version around.

Although Amiblitz or C are my favored languages for the amiga these days, there's no denying that AMOS is good fun still, and it is better than it's reputation (which was in part carved by the fact it's so simple to use that people with no real coding skills, but raw enthusiasm managed to satisfy their creative urges (ergo a lot of crappy stuff)). Stuff like Babeanoid shows that quite nice results can be obtained...... sheesh, now Im feeling nostalgic,.. might have to have a play with AMOS Pro again myself I think

At the end of the day though this is the classic amiga we're talking about, a person isnt going to get rich or reach a massive audience with what they create, so as long as you have fun that's all that matters

Feel free to ask for any help when/if you need it.

[runequester]

For something like a text adventure the language used isnt hugely important, just use what you're confortable with. It sounds as though youre leaning towards some form of AMOS, which will do the job nicely. As for which AMOS, I'd go for AMOS Pro without question. It's the most updated and most system friendly AMOS version around.
 
Although Amiblitz or C are my favored languages for the amiga these days, there's no denying that AMOS is good fun still, and it is better than it's reputation (which was in part carved by the fact it's so simple to use that people with no real coding skills, but raw enthusiasm managed to satisfy their creative urges (ergo a lot of crappy stuff)). Stuff like Babeanoid shows that quite nice results can be obtained...... sheesh, now Im feeling nostalgic,.. might have to have a play with AMOS Pro again myself I think
 
At the end of the day though this is the classic amiga we're talking about, a person isnt going to get rich or reach a massive audience with what they create, so as long as you have fun that's all that matters
 
Feel free to ask for any help when/if you need it.

True amiga spirit my friend.
 
This won't be a commercial project at all. Just something fun to do, and to have a final project I can point to and say "I made this".

[SamuraiCrow]

In the future, I'd like to do a tile based game like Hilt, so I figure this will be a good starting point.
 
Do you have opinion on the different versions of amos (normal, easy, pro) and what to go with?
 
Thanks for the encouragement!

If you're sure you want to go with an Amos flavor, you may as well go with Pro.  The only advantage of Amos the Creator is that some extensions work with it that don't work with AmosPro.  Realistically the extensions for AmosPro are better to work with anyway.  You can download AmosPro for free from the Amos Factory website and others.

Personally, I think AmigaE would be a lot more flexible for the kind of work that a text-based game would be.  The only thing that would be better in AmosPro would be the graphics handling if you want to keep it in ECS screen resolutions.  AmigaE works with AGA the same way as C and unlike C, has enough syntactic sugar to do object-oriented programming.

Hilt II was written in Blitz Basic if I'm not mistaken, but if your tile game is not action-oriented any of the above langauges will work.

I started writing a graphic adventure in AmosPro to test the memory bank capabilities but since there is a serious bug in the memory allocation of Data banks, I had to switch to another language.  I chose C++ since I was looking at taking on an artist that could do truecolor cartoon images and didn't need backward compatibility for the classics.  When my artist bailed out I quit the project.

Hopefully PortablE will make it possible to port AmigaE programs to other platforms like the next-gen Amigas among others.  AmosPro is forever doomed to be run in emulators on non-classic Amigas and the AmosPro compiler generates code that is far from optimal.

[Franko]

Way back around 82 when I got my very first VIC 20 the only game I had for it in the first couple of weeks was a plain text adventure called Mission Impossible on a cartridge the store threw in for free...

I always remember switching it on and me and the brother in law sitting there with hugely disappointed faces and asking each other "is this it..."

Boy were we wrong... within an hour we were both arguing should we go east, should we go west, open that door, no don't open that one...

Suffice to say from that moment on we were hooked...

Hopefully, when you've completed your game you'll release it for all us old adventurers to enjoy, best of luck...

(Strange... just writing this post I can still conjure up the images in my mind of all the locations described in that game...

[yakumo9275]

write it in inform6 and then use any infocom interpreter on the amiga... that would be pretty traidtional, you can do pics + music but I dont know the formats...

[ChaosLord]

@Chaoslord

Which is that text-adventure you wrote? Perhaps I've already seen it but didn't know you were the author, or maybe I wasn't aware at all of it. Tell us about it!

My 1st one was on Apple ][+.   I can't remember what I called it.
My parser was better than any Scott Adams adventure but not as good as Infocom.

The next 2 were on C64: Murkland, Haunted House
My parser was much better than any infocom parser.

I then decided that nobody wanted to play text adventures anymore so I gave up on them and ripped out the super duper mega parser and put it into BattleDroids Construction Set later renamed to BattleMech Construction Set (C64 & Amiga) then eventually ripped the parser out of that and plugged it into Total Chaos (Amiga).
 
So at least I got some lasting use out of my text adventure coding days.

[Karlos]

True BASIC has the absolute best string handling of any language ever.

I would rank Perl and PHP as far above any BASIC dialect in terms of string processing capability