Arbitrary death; TADS graphic


13 Mar 1995 15:57:08 -0800

Hi all.

Two unrelated articles caught my attention on r.a.i-f.

1. Arbitrary death:

Magnus Olsson (mol@marvin.df.lth.se) wrote:

> 3. Fire Witch: Here I must protest! You're really being unfair - because
> you've misunderstood the entire thing! This is *not* an "Instant death",
> this is a *puzzle*. You have an entire move to get out of the trap, and
> I can give you this much of a spoiler: unless you've dropped it, you
> were carrying the means of survival when you get caught, you just failed to
> use it. Blaming the author for that isn't quite fair, is it? Furthermore,
> in fact you can't win the game without setting of the trap (though
> under slightly different circumstances).

I've never played Fire Witch, so possibly I misunderstood, but it seems like
this is a one-turn deathtrap puzzle: you have one attempt to enter the
right command, and if you don't get it right the first time you die.

While this is clearly better than rooms that kill you off without warning,
this doesn't seem like a reasonable deathtrap. If you don't remember the
name of the object, even though you know it and realize it can be used to
solve the puzzle, you have to use your one command to "inventory".

How did other folks feel about this one turn deadline? Did others like it?
Did most people figure it out, or did most people die and then undo?

2. TADS graphic:

Anders Haavie (ahaavie@ifm.uio.no) wrote:

> Will the Brand New Tads Graphics program be available for macintosh ??
>
> (If you don't know what the Tads Graphics program is, download info from
> the tads directory on ftp.gmd.de )

Um, hm. There is a file on ftp.gmd.de, /if-archive/programming/tads, called
tgdoc.zip. It contains a lot of detail about a program called TADS/Graphic,
which allows you to associate graphics and sound with TADS programs.

This is interesting, and it sounds cool, but my April Fools detector is
going off. For one thing, the file isn't signed -- there is no indication
of who wrote it.

Does anybody know about this? It could be that there was a big thread about
this and I missed it, but some other possibilities come to mind.

- Dave Allen: allen@viewlogic.com