Comments on the Revised Version of Dinkum 5 January 1993 This version of Dinkum (Ver. 2.3) has several slight improvements perceptible to the user and significant improvements perceptible to the programmer. Because the improvements are slight from the user's perspective, a non-programming user should not delete the older version of Dinkum until it has been established that this newer version will compile on the user's computer. The user will notice some minor bugs corrected and there being more "Australia content" in the above ground, pre-game component of Dinkum. There were some fairly glaring omissions in the earlier version of the game concerning Australia content, i.e. there is a road in Dinkum but the earlier version had no road trains or dead kangaroos (the two most striking characteristics of Australian roads). Many people complained about the lack of a Save command in Dinkum. My original omission of the Save command was deliberate. The two main reasons why people play a text adventure game is either to be a an active participant in an action/fantasy story or to experience communicating through natural language to a computer. Both of these aspects are defeated by using a Save command. However my impression is that many people insist on having a Save command and won't play the game if it isn't there. Consequently I've come up with a compromise. If you start the game by typing "dinkum -s" rather than simply "dinkum" then the game creates a "data recorder" which appears in the beginning of the game. The data recorder acts like a tape recorder allowing the user to save moves and play them back in the current or later games. The generated file is in ASCII format and can be edited after finishing Dinkum. Type "examine recorder" after having taken it and Dinkum will explain how to use it. This data recorder has a couple of important limitations: Unlike most adventure games, Dinkum is dynamic, viz. the game changes every time you play it. So if you record a script for a game which takes you to a room where you find a weapon and then to another room where you find a monster, then the next time you use that script you may find the monster where you previously found the weapon (leading to a fairly short game). The other limitation of the data recorder is if you use the "dinkum -s" switch then you will not be admitted into the end game with the consequence being that "winning" Dinkum is impossible. To win Dinkum you must play it "on your own" without the unfair advantage of script files and a data recorder. In the "dinkum -h" help description I have a strict "NO MODIFICATION" rule for Dinkum. This rule is to protect myself against people hacking on Dinkum and releasing to the public indecent or buggy versions of the game with my name on it. Despite this rule I strongly encourage people to hack on Dinkum provided they comment all of their modifications and don't release their hacked versions directly to the public. If you think you have an improvement to Dinkum then please send me a copy and if I agree that it benefits the game then I'll incorporate it into the next release with suitable acknowledgements to yourself. I've significantly improved the coding style of Dinkum from the earlier version, i.e. you won't find a single "goto" in Dinkum. Dinkum is much better structured than it was before and makes better use of the C programming language. Dinkum has lots of scope for improvement and is still full of blemishes. However I would like to limit the scope of modifications to Dinkum in some significant ways: First, no enhancement to Dinkum can be allowed that reduces portability. If anything portability needs to be enhanced. Dinkum is designed for both the Unix and DOS operating systems. Dinkum will presently compile without warnings in DOS/TURBO-C Ver. 2, Sun OS, IBM RISC/6000, 386BSD and on the SGI Iris. The Dinkum executable must remain a single file and be small enough that the uncompressed DOS executable can fit on a double sided, double density floppy disk. This insures naive DOS users with old PCs can easily use Dinkum. The central layout of the game from the user's perspective should remain unchanged. Improvements should focus instead on enhancing natural language recognition, for example: Dinkum can not currently support compound sentences, i.e. "Take the whidjitty grub after lifting the rock and eat the grub". Dinkum does not really support questions, i.e. a character appears and the user asks the character "How do I unlock the door?". Questions represent an entirely different syntax from imperative commands. Also question answering capability would allow for inclusion of an ELIZA type subroutine for responding to questions not accounted for in the game's context. This could allow for the game going through many question/answer cycles before failing the Turing test. There are many words and synonyms that Dinkum does not recognize even though these words appear in the game. Anyway these are the improvements I would like to see in Dinkum and over the years will probably write them in myself if someone else doesn't beat me to it. Any suggestions or software contributions along these lines would be gratefully received. I hope you enjoy playing Dinkum. If you succeed in winning at Dinkum (it isn't easy) then please let me know, my address appears if you type "dinkum -h". Gary A. Allen, Jr.