Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous posts.)

While I have explored the cave some and will share my results, I have not gotten that much farther; I’m intentionally saving part of the game for a later post, because I want to focus on the parser, world model, and trying to work around the game’s bugs.

Before getting into all those things (and the cave itself), one brief bit of business from the town that I had trouble mapping. Aula in the comments pointed out an alternate map idea, and once I realized what the authors were going for, I was able to fix it into a pleasingly symmetrical shape.

(Mind you, it’s still not fully logical; it seems like you should be able to go straight from the Old Post Office to the Restaurant given the paths intercrossing out from them, but I’ll take comprehendability over absolute geographic sense.)

With that out of the way, I tried visiting and solving as much as I could before depositing a giant stack of inventory right in front of the cave entrance and saving my game. This turned out to be a major problem.

Cave entrance
You are standing on a ledge on major mountain. The ledge is about six feet wide here and heads west around the mountain. There is a cave cut into the side of the mountain.
There is a long rope with knots here
There is a beautiful oak pendant with a cloud carved on its face here
There is a copper key here
There is a CHEVY key here
There is some dried out corn here
There is a pair of large signal flags here
There is a miner’s helmet here
There is a can opener here
There is a strange coin here
There is a full bottle of Brador beer here
There is a full bottle of Grolsch beer here
There is a tuna syrian here
There is a scimitar here
There is a square dowel here
There is a sheet of parchment here
There is a turquoise charm here
There is a white disk with black writing here
There is a black disk with white writing here

(The scimitar I neglected to mention last time — it’s lying near the mountain, and based on the game including stats I assume is used for combat, like the sword in Zork.)

SAVE
Filename: start
Error — filename must be less than 28 characters

…uh oh. I tried various iterations, like single characters, or going past 28 characters, but no joy. What mysteriously worked was going one step to the west.

W
Major mountain ledge
The drawbridge is in the closed position, forming a path accross to Minor mountain

SAVE
Filename: start
Game saved

This seems to be the threshold where the various messages about crows and so forth stop showing up. If the same file structure from Ferret holds, this is a break between “part 1” and “part 2” of the game, in order to cope with memory limits; in Ferret, the game managed by having a linear structure that forced you along with its parts, unloading previous parts as you loaded the next one and never going backwards. In this case, you very definitely can go backwards, so there must be some clever maneuvering behind the scenes to jump between areas.

At least that’s my theory. I found after further testing that the major mountain ledge is the only location I could save my game. Additionally, it meant I had a strange item in my inventory.

You are currently carrying:
@Sitting at the station is the VS+EL express train

More experimentation is required (and I haven’t tried saving in every single room in the game, yet) but I’ll tolerate this for now; just note this is a serious pain because it applies to both saving and reloading games. (Rob has an alternate method that I haven’t been able to get work. I suspect some emulator-level shenanigans here, as opposed to an “authentic” bug.)

Before making it that far, we need a working light source. The helmet with a light of course is suggestive, but LIGHT HELMET and TURN ON HELMET and SWITCH HELMET and many other variants I tried didn’t work. I finally came across “turn helmet on” which I think may be a first for this blog.

TURN ON HELMET
What a ridiculous thing to try and do

TURN HELMET ON
The light on the helmet is now on.

(That is, verb-noun is the standard, and “turn on” is sort of a two-word verb; having the “on” afterwards is the highly unusual part. Also, the “ridiculous thing” obviously isn’t ridiculous; this reflects a danger of parsers trying to be sassy in their error messages.)

Heading on in…

…immediately there’s a branch upward going to an east-west tunnel. This tunnel represents a train station. To the west is a “lost and found office” which suggests some way of getting back items due to unfortunate shenanigans.

The VS+EL RR Lost and Found Office.
Here, items dropped by passengers of the VS+EL are collected so that they can be reclaimed by them. There is a doorway leading out to the south.

To the east is the station itself, including a paper giving times.

Main station
This is the main station of the Very Short and Extremely Local railroad (the VS+EL RR). There is one track here that enters from a tunnel to the south, and exits into a tunnel to the north. There is a small station house here.

IN
Inside Main Station
You are standing inside the main station of the VS+EL Railroad.
On the floor is a yellowed paper.

GET PAPER
Taken.

READ PAPER

THE VERY SHORT AND EXTREMELY LOCAL RAILROAD TIME SCHEDULE

(subject to change without notice)

Main Station ………………….a :00 d :09
River’s End station ………….. a :30 d :34
Dry Gulch Halt ………………. a :55 d :03
Stark Beach station ………….. a :30 d :34

You can follow the track north. Trying to go into a side notch resulted in death:

In the railroad tunnel
You are in a very dark tunnel which is used by the VS+EL RR. At various points along the east wall of the tunnel, there are places to stand in in case a train happens to come along.

GO WEST
In a notch in the wall
The pirate moves in for the kill. He lunges at you and wounds you
fatally. Oh the blood … the death

As the darkness of death fades, and the light intensifies, you find yourself falling quickly at first then slower, then slower still until you find yourself looking down on a strange land. Below is a river, a long river, so long that even at this height the river stretches forever. About 1 mile from each bank of the river is a tall mountain range. You slow more until you are about 1 foot from the ground, and then you lite gently on the surface of an eerie world.

The train destinations are what I’m postponing the exploration on for now. The land of the dead also is fairly large, and I found one treasure just lying around while moving around at random.

Darkness dwell
This section of the river bank has been name Darkness dwell because of the minimal amount of light found here. Most of the river edge is illuminated from some source above, but for some reason, this is not so here.
On the ground is a 1979 dime

Going back to the cave we’re in and avoiding the upward branch, the tunnel swerves back around to get a dining room / living quarters area.

The middle of the dining hall has a curious device which seems to be in the department of “describe a real object and make the puzzle trying to figure out what it’s saying”. I think it’s an engine, maybe? (That would make sense based on the CHEVY key.)

Southwest end of the great dining hall
This is the great dining hall of the kings that is mentioned in local folklore. The dining hall stretches off for almost 50 feet. There is a doorway leading south out of the room.

NE
In the large dining hall
You are in the large dining hall, which continues to the northeast and the southwest. There is a doorway to the northwest. There is a oak table here, with decorative carvings in the top and four long legs.
Set on the table is a beautiful pewter tea-set.
On your right is a round cylinder with a square hole in it. All over it you notice small depressions.

A side branch leads to a “beach view” which is taking the “volcano view” idea again of making a real long room description. Also there’s nudity, like Warp.

Beachview
You have come out upon a small terrace that overlooks a sandy white beach many many feet below. After diner, and some entertainment, it is told that the king and queen would come out on this terrace to observe the moonlight and stars. However, being that this is daytime, the view is quite different. In the distance, on the beach, near the water, many beautiful women, and handsome men can be seen bathing, apparently in the nude. However at this distance it is pretty hard to make any details out. The people are running around the beach, playing games of tag, and thoroughly enjoying themselves. There is a large bar at one end of the beach, where more naked men and women are lounging around sipping tall cool drinks. At the other end of the beach there is a series of small tents where various men and women are constantly entering and leaving, most smoking some sort of thin cigarette, obviously quite content with their lives. There is a railroad station located directly in front of the beach, the sign on the front is marked “Stark Beach Station”, however it is impossible to see if there are any trains at the station. There is a doorway back into the tunnel to the west.

Only a little adjacent of here is a library, and one of the few puzzles from this section: there’s a curtain with hooks.

Library
This is the king’s library. Along each wall are shelves of books on all subjects, some old, and some new. Breaking the shelving on the east wall is a doorway, and on the north wall, a set of curtains.
Next to the curtains, on each side, are small hooks to hold the curtains
Sitting on one of the library shelves is a hardbound book

I have not been able to move the hooks, but I haven’t tried doing much with my items yet. I did a run through my verb list to see if anything was helpful.

POKE seems really promising, especially because it asks you to provide an object, but it asks for more detail:

POKE HOOKS WITH SCIMITAR
You must specify where on the hooks you want to poke

POKE END OF HOOKS WITH SCIMITAR
Sorry … I could not parse that

The game, incidentally, claims some aspects of the parser are superior to Adventure and Zork. I don’t know what they mean by this. It certainly has full-sentence capability but in the kind where it wants very specific sentences, guess-the-phrase on top of guess-the-verb.

At least READ BOOK works.

DREAMPARK by Larry Niven and Stephen Barnes

This is a book about a fantasy theme park kind of like Westworld, and things go awry kind of like Westworld. Given how cursory the mention is there might be some reference I need to know about, so I’ll eventually report in after I’ve read the book.

1981 hardcover, via eBay.

Past the dining hall (and an extra 1979 wine you can nab) is a pantry with a corkscrew, a rubber glove, and a dumbwaiter. There are colored buttons that presumably control the dumbwaiter, but it isn’t working by default.

Pantry
You are in the pantry off of the great dining hall. Here, as food was prepared in the lower kitchen, many servants would carry dishes out to the king and queens, and their royal audience. There is a doorway to the south, and a set of stairs to the east. In the northern wall, set in the stone, is a dumbwaiter. Next to the dumbwaiter is a pair of buttons, one orange, and the other purple.
Hanging on one of the walls is a corkscrew.
Inside the dumbwaiter, you can see the platform that raises up and down
Resting on the table, is a rubber glove

(I was unable to open the wine with the corkscrew, but again, the parser is a terrible struggle and I may just be phrasing things wrong.)

Down the stairs mentioned in the pantry is a kitchen and various other related rooms:

The kitchen describes one exit being to the north, but there is no exit to the north. I’m needing to test every single exit in every single room because with this much jank you simply can’t trust room descriptions to be totally accurate.

Kitchen
This is the subterranean kitchen in which food was prepared for service in the King’s dining room. There are doorways off to the north, south, and east, and a narrow passage off to the northwest.

To the northwest you can’t carry much (other than your helmet) and there’s a crystal vase inside I presume is a treasure. As you might predict, it is impossible to carry out; the dumbwaiter is there, so I assume the puzzle is simply to get the dumbwaiter working.

Supply room
You are in a small supply room off of the kitchen. There are a series of shelves lining one wall, and a dumbwaiter against an other. There is a narrow passage to the east, leading back to the kitchen.
Resting on one of the shelves is a beautiful crystal vase.

There’s a fuse elsewhere, and a “utility room” with a fuse box, so I would think the two would go together!

Utility room
You are in a small room that contains the controls for the water and air heating and cooling systems. The controls however are frozen solid, and the faceplates describing their functions are missing.
There is a doorway to the west, and a small fuse box in one corner.

My first struggle was even being able to refer to the “small fuse box”; neither “small”, nor “fuse”, nor “box”, nor “small box”, nor even “fuse box” work. (GET FUSE BOX > I see no box here.) Having dealt with enough games that play fast and loose with their vocabulary, I came across FUSEBOX (all as one word, not like the game displays it!)

GET FUSEBOX
It is securely fastened to its surroundings

Huzzah! Except I still wasn’t able to translate this into replacing a busted fuse; the game doesn’t allow LOOK IN FUSEBOX (even though it does work as a command, and is mentioned in the help) nor does it let you OPEN the fusebox. So I assume one just replaces the right fuse in order to fix the dumbwaiter and get the vase, but I have no way of implementing that yet.

Three last things to mop up: a walking cane (described as having a “loop at one end”) and a metal washer (no extra description at all) and one puzzle I technically sort of solved. There’s a comedy club, with a bad comedian. It almost seems like a “circle-of-hell” situation.

The room of the caged comedian
This room was used by the king and his guest as an entertainment room. There are a couple of large chairs at one end of the room, which is separated from the other half by steel bars (thus forming a cage).

W
You can’t go there
The commedian behind the cage leans over and says:
“When I was in college, I took my girlfriend to a dog show…. and she own first prize.”

E
You can’t go there
The commedian behind the cage leans over and says:
“I used to ask my mother if I could go out ice-skating … she used to tell me ‘wait till it gets a little warmer'”

I was simply testing out directions (since none are described, even) and this led me to waiting in the room long enough that the comedian offered a cigar.

The comic, impressed by your endurance, says “Hey … give that person a cigar … anyone who can stand my jokes desires a prize”

So I’ve got a cigar on top of everything else. This is one of the largest and most random sets of objects I’ve had to juggle in an adventure game. I’m just hoping this mostly goes the Time Zone route and makes the matches between object and puzzle easy to find when they happen; having this many objects all at once plus complex combinations could be a bear. Ferret did get this size of inventory but also was segmented in such a way that the object count didn’t go out of control (…plenty of other things did, though).

To summarize the problems underground:

1.) dealing with the train (which I assume will lead to brand-new large areas giving my mapping a further workout)

2.) the hooks at the library (is this a parser issue?)

3.) the fuse box/fusebox (also a parser issue?)

There’s still a locked post box, the bank, the hen who is skittish, and the strange humming cube to deal with aboveground. I’m also 99% sure now this is a gather-the-treasure-in-one-spot game, but I don’t know yet how to definitely be sure something is a treasure, nor where it should go to get credit.