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Luminous Horizon
''Earth and Sky'' is an interactive fiction trilogy written and produced by American author Paul O'Brian about the adventures of a brother and sister who gain superpowers while searching for their lost parents. Games in the series have won awards in the annual Interactive Fiction Competition and received an XYZZY Award. ''Earth and Sky'' The first game begins a month after the disappearance of two scientists at the local university, Clair and Scott Colborn. After exploring their parents' lab, the playable character, Emily Colborn, and her brother Austin find that their parents had been developing suits that grant sky-themed and earth-themed superpowers. Using the suits, Emily gains the ability to fly, generate fog and shoot electric blasts. Adopting the superhero names 'Earth' and 'Sky', the siblings decide to search for their parents themselves and defend the campus from an accidentally mutated monster. The game is entirely text based and players type commands to move throug ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Z-machine
The Z-machine is a virtual machine that was developed by Joel Berez and Marc Blank in 1979 and used by Infocom for its text adventure games. Infocom compiled game code to files containing Z-machine instructions (called story files or Z-code files) and could therefore port its text adventures to a new platform simply by writing a Z-machine implementation for that platform. With the large number of incompatible home computer systems in use at the time, this was an important advantage over using native code or developing a compiler for each system. History The "Z" of Z-machine stands for Zork, Infocom's first adventure game. Z-code files usually have names ending in .z1, .z2, .z3, .z4, .z5, .z6, .z7, or .z8, where the number is the version number of the Z-machine on which the file is intended to be run, as given by the first byte of the story file. This is a modern convention, however. Infocom itself used extensions of .dat (Data) and .zip (ZIP = Z-machine Interpreter Program ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Interpreter (computing)
In computer science, an interpreter is a computer program that directly execution (computers), executes instructions written in a Programming language, programming or scripting language, without requiring them previously to have been Compiler, compiled into a machine language program. An interpreter generally uses one of the following strategies for program execution: # Parse the source code and perform its behavior directly; # Translator (computing), Translate source code into some efficient intermediate representation or object code and immediately execute that; # Explicitly execute stored precompiled bytecode made by a compiler and matched with the interpreter Virtual Machine. Early versions of Lisp programming language and BASIC interpreter, minicomputer and microcomputer BASIC dialects would be examples of the first type. Perl, Raku (programming language), Raku, Python (programming language), Python, MATLAB, and Ruby (programming language), Ruby are examples of the second, w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
2004 Video Games
4 (four) is a number, numeral and digit. It is the natural number following 3 and preceding 5. It is the smallest semiprime and composite number, and is considered unlucky in many East Asian cultures. In mathematics Four is the smallest composite number, its proper divisors being and . Four is the sum and product of two with itself: 2 + 2 = 4 = 2 x 2, the only number b such that a + a = b = a x a, which also makes four the smallest squared prime number p^. In Knuth's up-arrow notation, , and so forth, for any number of up arrows. By consequence, four is the only square one more than a prime number, specifically three. The sum of the first four prime numbers two + three + five + seven is the only sum of four consecutive prime numbers that yields an odd prime number, seventeen, which is the fourth super-prime. Four lies between the first proper pair of twin primes, three and five, which are the first two Fermat primes, like seventeen, which is the third. On t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
2001 Video Games
1 (one, unit, unity) is a number representing a single or the only entity. 1 is also a numerical digit and represents a single unit of counting or measurement. For example, a line segment of ''unit length'' is a line segment of length 1. In conventions of sign where zero is considered neither positive nor negative, 1 is the first and smallest positive integer. It is also sometimes considered the first of the infinite sequence of natural numbers, followed by 2, although by other definitions 1 is the second natural number, following 0. The fundamental mathematical property of 1 is to be a multiplicative identity, meaning that any number multiplied by 1 equals the same number. Most if not all properties of 1 can be deduced from this. In advanced mathematics, a multiplicative identity is often denoted 1, even if it is not a number. 1 is by convention not considered a prime number; this was not universally accepted until the mid-20th century. Additionally, 1 is th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
2000s Interactive Fiction
S, or s, is the nineteenth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''ess'' (pronounced ), plural ''esses''. History Origin Northwest Semitic šîn represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative (as in 'ip'). It originated most likely as a pictogram of a tooth () and represented the phoneme via the acrophonic principle. Ancient Greek did not have a phoneme, so the derived Greek letter sigma () came to represent the voiceless alveolar sibilant . While the letter shape Σ continues Phoenician ''šîn'', its name ''sigma'' is taken from the letter ''samekh'', while the shape and position of ''samekh'' but name of ''šîn'' is continued in the '' xi''. Within Greek, the name of ''sigma'' was influenced by its association with the Greek word (earlier ) "to hiss". The original name of the letter "sigma" may have been ''san'', but due to the complic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Feelie
Infocom was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called ''Cornerstone''. Infocom was founded on June 22, 1979, by staff and students of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and lasted as an independent company until 1986, when it was bought by Activision. Activision shut down the Infocom division in 1989, although they released some titles in the 1990s under the Infocom ''Zork'' brand. Activision abandoned the Infocom trademark in 2002. Overview Infocom games are text adventures where users direct the action by entering short strings of words to give commands when prompted. Generally the program will respond by describing the results of the action, often the contents of a room if the player has moved within the virtual world. The user reads this information, decides what to do, and enters another short series of words. Examples inc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
XYZZY Award For Best Use Of Medium
The XYZZY Awards are the annual awards given to works of interactive fiction, serving a similar role to the Academy Awards for film. The awards were inaugurated in 1997 by Eileen Mullin, the editor of ''XYZZYnews''. Any game released during the year prior to the award ceremony is eligible for nomination to receive an award. The decision process takes place in two stages: members of the interactive fiction community nominate works within specific categories and sufficiently supported nominations become finalists within those categories. Community members then vote among the finalists, and the game receiving a plurality of votes is given the award in an online ceremony. Since 1997 the XYZZY Awards have become one of the most important events within the interactive fiction community. Together with events like the Interactive Fiction Competition and Spring Thing, the XYZZY Awards provide opportunities for the community to encourage and reward the creation and development of new works ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frotz
The Z-machine is a virtual machine that was developed by Joel Berez and Marc Blank in 1979 and used by Infocom for its text adventure games. Infocom compiled game code to files containing Z-machine instructions (called story files or Z-code files) and could therefore port its text adventures to a new platform simply by writing a Z-machine implementation for that platform. With the large number of incompatible home computer systems in use at the time, this was an important advantage over using native code or developing a compiler for each system. History The "Z" of Z-machine stands for Zork, Infocom's first adventure game. Z-code files usually have names ending in .z1, .z2, .z3, .z4, .z5, .z6, .z7, or .z8, where the number is the version number of the Z-machine on which the file is intended to be run, as given by the first byte of the story file. This is a modern convention, however. Infocom itself used extensions of .dat (Data) and .zip (ZIP = Z-machine Interpreter Program), ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Glulx
Glulx is a 32-bit portable virtual machine intended for writing and playing interactive fiction. It was designed by Andrew Plotkin to relieve some of the restrictions in the venerable Z-machine format. For example, the Z-machine provides native support for 16-bit integers, while Glulx natively supports 32-bit integers. Versions and popularity The Inform compiler, starting with version 6.30, can produce either Z-machine or Glulx story files. A Spanish interactive fiction development system called Superglús also uses Glulx. Despite being a better-adapted virtual machine for modern computing hardware and being just as accessible to developers, Glulx continues to lag behind the Z-machine in popularity, largely due to the comparative rarity of interpreters. The most popular interpreter for Glulx is Andrew Plotkin's Glulxe. Glulxe uses the Glk API for input and output. File and email extensions The MIME Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is an Internet standard that e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
XYZZY Award
The XYZZY Awards are the annual awards given to works of interactive fiction, serving a similar role to the Academy Awards for film. The awards were inaugurated in 1997 by Eileen Mullin, the editor of ''XYZZYnews''. Any game released during the year prior to the award ceremony is eligible for nomination to receive an award. The decision process takes place in two stages: members of the interactive fiction community nominate works within specific categories and sufficiently supported nominations become finalists within those categories. Community members then vote among the finalists, and the game receiving a plurality of votes is given the award in an online ceremony. Since 1997 the XYZZY Awards have become one of the most important events within the interactive fiction community. Together with events like the Interactive Fiction Competition and Spring Thing, the XYZZY Awards provide opportunities for the community to encourage and reward the creation and development of new works ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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