ABOUT THIS RELEASE OF GUARD DUTY

Those of you who played the competition version of _Guard Duty_
may remember a buggy game that, for example, crashed when the
player attempted to take inventory.  I was frankly baffled by this
bug, since as I recalled my beta-testers and I had played through
the game fully just before I submitted it.  At first I thought the
problem was that it had only been tested under a Unix version of
Frotz, and perhaps Windows versions behaved differently.  But no,
as I found when I tried running the competition version again under
the same Unix version of Frotz it had been tested with; even under
Unix it crashed.

I could think of only one possibility, only one thing that had
changed between the testing and the submission: I had recompiled
the game without the debug switch.  Sure enough, that was the
problem.  Or more specifically, the strict error checking switch
(which as far as I can tell automatically entails the debug switch).
With strict error checking on, the game ran perfectly, without even
a non-fatal error message.  Without it, it crashed.  Old hands at
Inform may think this an obvious place to look, but this was my first
Inform game.  It never even occurred to me that if the game ran fine
with debugging on, it might not with it off.  All right, so I'm an
idiot.  Sorry.

Anyway, _Guard Duty_ to begin with already fell short of my
aspirations, due to the dynamic memory limit.  There were a great many
things I wanted to implement but just couldn't.  This being the case,
I really didn't feel motivated to spend a lot of time debugging a
necessarily incomplete game (when a version of Inform or some new
compiler with a higher dynamic memory limit comes out I might complete
it as I had intended to), so I just went ahead and compiled it again
with strict error-checking on.  Since I couldn't figure out how to do
this without the debug switch (if that's even possible), I manually
disabled the debugging commands.  Messy, yes.  A kludge, yes.  Makes
the game run without crashing when you take inventory, yes.  All in
all, I suppose it's a fair trade.

Also included in the zip file that this readme file should have come
in is a GIF file called guardpic.gif which was inadvertently left out
of the competition submission (though at the time I was going to
submit it in HTML format instead).  The game will notify you when to
refer to this file (though if you can't read GIF files, don't despair;
the GIF file isn't actually necessary to play the game).  The _Guard
Duty_ game also makes reference to a help file, guardhlp.z5.  As of
the time of this zip file's being submitted to the if archive (December
31, 1999), I haven't submitted the guardhlp.z5 file yet, but it should
be there sometime next week.

Thanks for downloading _Guard Duty_.  Hope you have fun.

  Jason F. Finx