Magic Words in ChuckADV
From: Chuck Darling
Sunday, August 17, 2025
In the original Colossal Cave Adventure, Locations were held
in a table of 300 places, or rooms.
In 00Cedar, the locations are .txt files,
and you can store many more than that ...
The 12 line text files are less than 1k,
and the htm files are less than 5k.
That's 6k, plus a couple k in the beanlist. Say 10k per location.
That's 100 locations per Meg,
and a Gigabyte is 1024 Meg
That's 104,200 locations per Gig.
Got 4 Gig free on your phone ?
You could have 100,000 Adventure
locations, and 100,000 Magic Words.
And still have 3 Gig FREE...!
Think you could build an Adventure
like that ?
You could share it with your friends
with USB drives, or post it to your
Gdrive, or OneDrive.
Command words in Colossal Cave
were also stored in a table.
The program would search for
the word, or combination of words,
and then perform a program action
based on those words.
In 00Cedar, Magic Words
are held within square brackets,
with the bracket followed by
an 'asterisk+location' or STARDIR.
If you type a word matching a
STARDIR word, that's where you'll go.
STARDIR words and typed commands are evaluated as uppercase.
This allows for easy usage,
even if your text editor likes
to mix upper and lowercase.
I modified the sit.txt to include
at 001Start,
a STARDIR magic word:
[plugH]*Bridge
By typing PLUGH or plugH at
the 001Start position,
you will move to the BRIDGE
location, if it exists.
You can have many magic words,
one for each location.
And if you have duplicate copies
if a location, say, to the west,
THAT location could have the magic
word, and not the original location.
This allows different game action
depending on which copy of a location is reached.
and, of course, you could modify
the NSEWUD links, too,
leading to Adventurous confusions ...
You can provide different images
for the "room" ...
a north view, a south view, etc.
Game action views too.
When you type .o
to see the contents of
a location, Line1 is not
shown...
That would make it too easy
to simply look up the magic word...
You have to type .c1
to allow Line1 to be displayed
using .o
Typing .c1 hides it again.
[Chuck's 00Cedar JPICedar ]
[ This page built with JPICedar by Chuck Darling Sunday 8-17-2025 Time : 10:08am]