Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!reading!bru-cc!ralph
From: ralph@cc.brunel.ac.uk (Ralph Mitchell)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.games.bugs
Subject: Re: Adventure is being REALLY dain-bramaged....
Message-ID: <687@Terra.cc.brunel.ac.uk>
Date: 26 Apr 89 14:46:48 GMT
References: <12537@reed.UUCP>
Reply-To: ralph@ccs.brunel.ac.uk (Ralph Mitchell)
Organization: Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK
Lines: 52

In article <12537@reed.UUCP> ameiba@reed.UUCP (Keith Steiger) writes:
>Adventure had been doing silly things lately.  If you try to invoke it, it
>prints lots of odd error messages.
>
>First, to stderr, it says:
>No adventure just now
>
>Then to stdout it says:
>Section 1
>Section 2
>[...etc]
>got the data.  save as "advent"? Couldn't open adventure
>
>And, finally, to stderr, it says
>Exit status 1
>
>This is to be considered a Bad Thing.  Any ideas?


The original Crowther/Woods Colossal Cave adventure does that when it first
runs.  It reads the plain text database and then dumps out a compressed
database file that loads up very much faster for subsequent runs.  The idea
is that the games adminstrator runs the program to load the database, answers
a few questions as to cave opening hours, wizards magic word, time-override
word, motd, etc, and then he stores the compressed database along with the
executable.  The (rather large) plain text database can then be moved off
to some backup media, to save space.  This also has the side effect of making
the database unreadable, because of the way the text messages are compressed.

The sections are (I think):

  1 - Long description of each location
  2 - Short description of some locations
  3 - Travel table (which words to use to get from location M to locaction N)
  ?   Vocabulary
  ?   Inventory (all object including treasures)
  ?   Random messages
  ?   Special messages
  ?   Magic messages

I forget the rest, it's been a long time...  I think your problem is that
it is unable to open the file 'advent' to store the compressed database.
That never used to stop it from running, though.  Mind you, I'm going back
to the days of 150 locations, max score of 350 and the whole thing written
in Fortran IV :-)

Ralph Mitchell
-- 
 From:  Ralph Mitchell at Brunel University, Uxbridge, UB8, 3PH, UK
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