[HN Gopher] Dungeons and Directories, an exploration game in you... ___________________________________________________________________ Dungeons and Directories, an exploration game in your file explorer Author : mistermatt Score : 102 points Date : 2023-12-12 16:08 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (wheybags.com) (TXT) w3m dump (wheybags.com) | CppPro wrote: | This is very cool. | seanmcdirmid wrote: | I remember when I was 6 and my dad brought home an Osbourne for | me to play with. Just using CPM felt like dungeon diving to this | weird world where you might find a loot in the form of a game or | something. | krumpet wrote: | I completely agree with this comment. I could have spent all | day on my C64 without even having a game to play or knowing how | to code beyond PRINT and GOTO. Hacking around on a computer | back in the 80s made me feel like I was part of a secret club | and that, at any moment, I was going to live out War Games or | some such (especially once we had a modem). The possibilities | seemed limitless! | supportengineer wrote: | As a young teen, I joined a local Commodore users group and at | the meetings you could buy the latest monthly floppy disk for a | small fee, and you never knew what you would find on it. | gopher_space wrote: | My first introduction to The Command Line was playing MUDs on a | IIgs and I've never stopped thinking about it in terms of | exploration. | ikari_pl wrote: | yes yes yes! | | I tried to convey some of that magic, or at least logically | reason why those 8-bits were awesome, in a blog post once - | https://retrofun.pl/2021/05/18/hobbyarding/ :) | | It still feels like this sometimes. Finding poorly documented | system calls, changing screen properties in ways beyond BASIC, | getting into how CP/M works internally... (more comprehensible | than today's 1000x larger systems)... Or even doing Advent of | Code in BASIC is cool! | krumpet wrote: | I tried conveying the same to my teen children. It went over | like a lead zeppelin. | ikari_pl wrote: | so it IS only in our heads? | | on the other hand, nobody would read a manual these days | anymore... | sudobash1 wrote: | When I got my first PC (a Linux Eee PC netbook), I remember | opening an xterm and typing each letter of the alphabet, one at | a time and hitting TAB-TAB to see all the commands that start | with that letter. Not an efficient way to learn how to use | bash, but it was exciting. | | The biggest hurdle for me was figuring out "how do I open a | file?" I could cd around and ls, but what if I wanted to open a | .doc in openoffice? There was no "double-click" for the command | line. | bee_rider wrote: | Ah... I think I vaguely remember a similar older program that | would (optionally, of course!) as a funny option delete the files | when you "defeated" them. | pimlottc wrote: | You might be thinking of this Doom mod that create monsters for | each system process and would kill an actual process every time | you killed one: | | https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html | bee_rider wrote: | I think by brain has combined this program and the inner | space program that the sibling comment mentioned. | butz wrote: | Haven't looked it up in detail yet, but I am wondering if | game process is a boss or player entity? | Eiriksmal wrote: | Or Operation: Inner Space. It used the file system to generate | sectors to visit to clear viruses from your EXEs, and | collecting non-contaminated EXEs to use as currency. | | It works great with Windows' backwards compatibility, but | modern filesystems have so many thousands of directories the | game is now impossible to complete. | | http://www.sdispace.com/ | bee_rider wrote: | I think I probably combined these programs in my head. | strictnein wrote: | Thanks! Really enjoyed this game, but couldn't remember the | name. | mastersummoner wrote: | Went looking for this comment. Loved this game as a kid. | RajT88 wrote: | Strange they used shortcuts on Windows, as Windows has had links | since Vista: | | https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2016/12/02/symlin... | | Either this is because it's not at all well known, or because | they think some users will be on XP. (Which would be strange) | skrebbel wrote: | Maybe it was easier? Iirc at least in some recent ish Windows | versions, by default you needed admin privileges to run mklink. | Given that a shortcut is just a regular file, that solves a lot | of problems. | sumtechguy wrote: | That depends on your version of windows (newer versions are | more relaxed on it). Also file links are 'weird' in windows. | | You have 3 types junction points, file links and directory | links. Each one acting in its very weird odd way. Junction | points are for local only directories. Files for files and | directories can be either local dirs or remote SMB points. | Junctions vs dir can be an interesting trade off on what you | want it to do. With junciton being faster for many operations | but local only. Also if the file is less than ~500 bytes | there is no real gain as you will probably just consume MFT | anyway either way. | wheybags wrote: | The problem is the max path size. There was a similar problem | on Linux, where you have a max number of symlinks you can | follow before the system gives up. Macos works because finder | resolves symlinks and opens the target directly. | prophesi wrote: | > In the end, the current version of the game create 41,514 | directories, 15,2041 files (mostly empty files with messages in | their names), and 45,399 links, which makes it rather unplayable | for those unfortunate enough to try running it on a mechanical | hard drive. | | https://github.com/wheybags/DungeonsAndDirectories/blob/mast... | | Be warned if you're not using an SSD! | antx wrote: | Well, that seems like the ideal candidate for a RAM drive, | doesn't it? | thot_experiment wrote: | Ramdisks are extremely slept on, there is a lot of stuff you | can kludge with a ramdisk in a pinch. I had to do some video | stream processing the other day and I didn't have time. So I | just made a ramdisk and read/wrote jpegs at 30fps, yeah it's | stupid as hell, but it worked when I needed it to and that's | what matters. | _0ffh wrote: | I have various folders mapped to RAM, like e.g. /var/tmp. | | This has many uses, as you said. E.g. sometimes even just | downloading a video stream to disc creates a temporary file | in the destination folder for every fragment. I just d/l | those into /var/tmp first and then mv the finished video to | where it's supposed to live. I'm sure both my SSD and HDD | are grateful! =) | anthk wrote: | /dev/shm | neilv wrote: | I once did something based on the same principle, for a (very- | very light) security solution, atop a simple closed-source media | appliance that could play from USB Storage. | | I made a script on Linux to create a huge directory tree | representing every possible sequence of a password of length N. | Only one password path through the tree got the viewer to the | directory that had the non-kid-safe media files. | | The non-security caveat of this was that the appliance seemed to | scan the entire filesystem upon mount, which took a long time. | (Even though it provided no UI, other than clicking to open | directories and media files within them. Maybe the reason for the | scan was to report to the mothership what content each user had, | though, in this case, I had networking permanently disabled.) At | least the huge tree didn't overflow any limit that prevented the | appliance from working after an initial delay. | wwweston wrote: | Love this, but seems to me that if most directories didn't have | files, you could `find` your way through... | neilv wrote: | The "very-very light" part is that it was easily defeated if | you removed the USB Storage from the dumb appliance, and | plugged it into almost anything else. | | If you had only the dumb appliance UI, however, finding the | files would be a bigger chore than even energetic kids could | accomplish in mere hours, and only if they knew it was there | (the "password UI" was also hidden a little). | landryraccoon wrote: | Interesting. You'd need about a billion files to store all | possible 6 character file names assuming you limited yourself | to latin alphanumeric characters. How big are these USB drives? | geek_at wrote: | Many years ago I wrote a tamagochi like virtual pet called | "Virus" which lived as "name.virus" file in a folder and you | could feed it text files with a ".food" extension. Based on its | DNA (random strings inside the".virus"file) it liked certain | words more or less and had to eat quite a few files when it was | Hungry | | It also left ".poop" files in the folder you had to clean up in | order for it to stay healthy. Also added mating and offsprings | which would fork the process so each would "live" their own life | hashbazz wrote: | Interesting idea. Horrible copy. I didn't get much past the first | room, where my "eyes perked up" at seeing something shiny. A text | adventure, among other things, has to be written well. | sndwnm wrote: | https://github.com/ChrisRx/dungeonfs Here's a pretty cool take | using Linux | abledon wrote: | the thing should run out a VB6 script embedded in a .xlsx | spreadsheet... | | Then you could have a portable game to bring into any enterprise | office environment | bluetwo wrote: | Minor point: Creativity doesn't need a lot of tech. | skogweb wrote: | Is there an easy way to remove all the generated files? | nomercy400 wrote: | Creating these folder crawling games was great, until you get to | the end, and the folder paths become too large and files and | folders start disappearing.. and you learn about windows folder | limits. Ah, fun times.. | | Btw, that was 20 years ago. | cozzyd wrote: | should use FUSE! | butz wrote: | There was a game "Virus: The Game" (1997) on PC which takes place | in your file system. | kimixa wrote: | There was also Inner Space (1992) [0] - possibly a similar | idea, where levels are directories on your computer, and the | goal to collect the "icons" (normally executables IIRC) inside. | | I remember having it on some demo disk as a kid | | [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation:_Inner_Space | stalfosknight wrote: | Minor nitpick: Why are people still insisting on calling macOS | "OSX"? It hasn't been "Mac OS X" for quite some time now. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-12-13 23:00 UTC)