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'Fraid I missed Dave Picton's message in a thread discussing the
location of food in various adventure versions, and irritatingly,
Google doesn't let me reply to messages over a month old.
In that post Dave Picton wrote:
> I suspect that one feature has been missed out of the reconstructed
> Fortran 77 version of the 440-point game. Mike Arnautov said that
> the 440-point game had food in the pantry - but the Fortran 77 version
> has it in the building.
This puzzled me, because I'd checked the adv440 database before making
that assertion. But Dave is quite right, of course, at start of the
game the food is in the building. Examining the source of the program,
and digging in my memory, helped to solve the problem. So here's the
definitive answer, for the benefit of the masses eager to know the
answer.
The adv440 database does indeed specify the initial location of food
to be in the pantry. However, it also has an explicit bit of
intialisation in the program itself, which places the food in the
building. There is a reason for this. Adv440 is unique in that it
makes dwarves cumpulsively tidy minded. If in their wanderings around
the cave they come across a misplaced object (i.e. an object not in
its initial location), they'll pick it up and carry it around with
them, until they happen to walk into the initial location of the
object, in which case they drop it there.
When food is destroyed (eaten), it is actually moved into the "dwarves
stores" (a location barred to the player). This is also where new
dwarves get created by the game, hence the next dwarf to be born will
pick up the food and promptly take the only exit available from the
stores -- into the web maze. Given the cave geography, in his random
walk he is very likely to walk into the pantry quite soon afterwards,
and he'll drop the food there, because that's where it belongs.
I.e. the food does indeed start in the building, where dwarves cannot
go, but if eaten, it will reappear in the pantry.
In re-writing Adv440 in A-code as a part of the Adv660 project, I
regretfully ditched the above explained setup. There were two reasons:
(1) Cave geography in A-code does not exist in any explicit way, so
emulating logically correct dwarf wanderings through the cave would
have been very difficult, and (2) hacking in an additional object
attribute (initial location) would have meant much more work on the
A-code engine than I was contemplating at the time. As the result,
Adv660 dwarves are just thieves, and they don't actually walk the cave
(though I don't believe players can tell the difference on that one!).
--
Mike Arnautov
html://www.mipmip.dsl.pipex.com
'Fraid I missed Dave Picton's message in a thread discussing the
location of food in various adventure versions, and irritatingly,
Google doesn't let me reply to messages over a month old.
In that post Dave Picton wrote:
> I suspect that one feature has been missed out of the reconstructed
> Fortran 77 version of the 440-point game. Mike Arnautov said that
> the 440-point game had food in the pantry - but the Fortran 77 version
> has it in the building.
This puzzled me, because I'd checked the adv440 database before making
that assertion. But Dave is quite right, of course, at start of the
game the food is in the building. Examining the source of the program,
and digging in my memory, helped to solve the problem. So here's the
definitive answer, for the benefit of the masses eager to know the
answer.
The adv440 database does indeed specify the initial location of food
to be in the pantry. However, it also has an explicit bit of
intialisation in the program itself, which places the food in the
building. There is a reason for this. Adv440 is unique in that it
makes dwarves cumpulsively tidy minded. If in their wanderings around
the cave they come across a misplaced object (i.e. an object not in
its initial location), they'll pick it up and carry it around with
them, until they happen to walk into the initial location of the
object, in which case they drop it there.
When food is destroyed (eaten), it is actually moved into the "dwarves
stores" (a location barred to the player). This is also where new
dwarves get created by the game, hence the next dwarf to be born will
pick up the food and promptly take the only exit available from the
stores -- into the web maze. Given the cave geography, in his random
walk he is very likely to walk into the pantry quite soon afterwards,
and he'll drop the food there, because that's where it belongs.
I.e. the food does indeed start in the building, where dwarves cannot
go, but if eaten, it will reappear in the pantry.
In re-writing Adv440 in A-code as a part of the Adv660 project, I
regretfully ditched the above explained setup. There were two reasons:
(1) Cave geography in A-code does not exist in any explicit way, so
emulating logically correct dwarf wanderings through the cave would
have been very difficult, and (2) hacking in an additional object
attribute (initial location) would have meant much more work on the
A-code engine than I was contemplating at the time. As the result,
Adv660 dwarves are just thieves, and they don't actually walk the cave
(though I don't believe players can tell the difference on that one!).
--
Mike Arnautov
html://www.mipmip.dsl.pipex.com
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