Teletext

[davidn]

I have now achieved the debatable accolade of having been on Teletext twice. The first time it was when Digitizer still existed - someone requested a solution to Simon 2 and I sent in my guide. The trouble was that the paragraph I supplied was too long and they had to trim it, meaning my carefully crafted help came out largely as gibberish. This time, it's as part of a feature on freeware games.

For anyone outside Europe, I should explain that Teletext is a basic news/information service broadcast through the television, and is run by an old BBC Micro somewhere in Broadcasting House's attic. It's a bit like the Internet, except even more unreliable and slow.

Comments

[davidn]

"10 INPUT "WHAT IS YOUR NAME?"; Z$: PRINT "HELLO "; Z$" used to impress the entire class.

[kjorteo]

:shot - #zap shot - Arg I've been shot - #restart - :shot - Arg I've been shot again still impresses (well, mostly frightens, but probably also impresses at least a little) Slither to this day.

[davidn]

What a length of time to pick up replies to a thread again! I think that that would probably both impress and frighten anyone who hadn't seen the ZZT editor before - it's certainly the only language I know of where you start with #end. Or modify the code while it's running. Or have code required to have a physical location. Or...

[kjorteo]

Well, I hadn't seen this entry before, and you just linked me to it now!

When I posted that Magicentipede script in my journal, Slither seemed particularly concerned about how I claimed I had gotten around size limits by hiding the code in the walls, because he wasn't used to there being size limits, and had no idea what I was talking about as far as hiding the code in the walls. Hiding code in the walls? Really, now.

So I explained how the object with that script was placed inside the walls and made to look like them, the actual walls surrounding it making it completely immobile and completely impossible for the player to actually touch. Then I gave a brief explanation of the #bind command. When I was finished, he looked at me as though I had just drawn a pentagram on the floor and sacrificed a cat right before his eyes.

[davidn]

:) The oddest thing about it (and, well, this is up against some pretty stiff competition as far as ZZT in general is concerned) is that it doesn't seem particularly unusual in context - I remember gradually learning it with an experimental game when I learned about objects going through their scripts procedurally, sending messages to each other to get them to skip to labels, locking to prevent that from happening, and so on. (It did take me a moment to remember to put "#end" at the start to stop objects running through their scripts immediately.) All of that makes perfect sense, until you add on the layers and layers of workarounds and trickery that have built up over fifteen years, and then try to compare the result with any language that has existed for the same amount of time.

I'm still not sure what exactly the #bind command does... formally. I know that it means "use the script attached to this object", but does that give each object its own copy of the script when the world is played, and otherwise acts like it was an object with the same script copy and pasted? Or was it - as I seem to remember - that each object would share that bound object's script, and have its own... place marker, being affected by all the code mutation lunacy that ZZT positively encourages, such as zapping and restoring of labels by multiple objects that are bound to a single script? My head hurts.

[kjorteo]

You know, that's a very good question...and depending on the answer, all the enemies in Adventure of Sam behave either exactly as intended, or on a sort of "whoops, it wasn't supposed to parse quite like that, but the end result is still the same, so I won't fiddle with it" level. They work, either way....

I have a reputation as a bit of an engine guy (which basically means I do things with ZZT that are scary even to other ZZTers), which the Adventure of Sam boss battles no doubt illustrate...I've found that many of my more complicated and ambitious projects "feel" unstable and like they're held together by bubblegum and hope as I'm hammering them out, but as long as they actually work in the end and the player is unable to break them, there isn't really a need to go back and make the code prettier. I mean, this is ZZT we're talking about.

And yes, it's actually somewhat alarming how normal ZZT code looks and feels once you sink deeper and deeper into the madness. Slither's horror is a source of great amusement for me, but was actually a little unexpected at first. "What? Those are just commands that change labels into comments and back at runtime so that objects can have multiple copies of the same label and sense how many times something has happened based on which is the first label that hasn't been commented out yet. What's so strange about...oh, right."