IllogiGames talk:Sinkhole
Went totally nuts and spent a horrible amount of time building a monster, and here it is. I think this will be the end of my game writing career, at least for the time being -- need to spend time doing other things too (like washing coffee stains out of my clothes, looking for the telephone (buried somewhere, under papers), checking phone messages (haven't done that in weeks) and stuff like that).
It started as an impossible thing which nobody would ever get through (BWAHAHAHAHA) or so I suspected. But then I added hints to a lot of the rooms, and it should be pretty playable. But .... DON'T click on the 'Hint' links until you feel like you need 'em. 'Cause once you've seen a hint there's no way to 'un-see' it again.
And DO click through the "Some rules" link and read the text there the first time you play it. (Anyhow I think you should.... heck the text is there, someone should read it, eh?)
The source to the game itself is broken into two pieces, which are in Sinkhole_1.source and Sinkhole_2.source.
The script used to convert the source into the uploaded files is in cv_dungeon_2
The commands used to do the compilation are:
cv_dungeon_2 Sinkhole_1.source -o Sinkhole_1.mainspaced -split 4 cv_dungeon_2 Sinkhole_2.source -o Sinkhole_2.mainspaced -split 11
Part I is split into four files, and Part II is split into 11 files, in order to stay under the 2 megabyte per file limit on Illogicopedia.
Uploading the split files is done by hand, using "Go insane", and it's a major pain in the katunza. It takes me close to half an hour to upload all 15 files (or maybe it just seems that way, I haven't actually timed it).
Unfortunately the documentation for cv_dungeon_2 hasn't been written. It has a usage message of some sort (if it's invoked with no or bad arguments), but it's not clear how useful that message is.
One point worth noting is that the attribute 'relations' which are specified in the game files, and which are extremely touchy and the implementation of which is rather buggy, are only there to speed up compilation. Without them, the compiler generates 2^N state objects, where N is the number of attributes (as in, "You have the hotdogs", that kind of attribute) and the "intermediate bulge" is deadly.
Another point: If you want to play with hacking this, use a reasonably fast machine to build it. This was done on a 3.something GHz system with eight processors and 16 gigs of memory and compiling it was real slow.
And that's all I can think of just now. Snarglefoop (talk) 04:32, 28 Ergust 2014 (UTC)