intfiction.org

Oh, it happened to you too? I thought it was some weird combination of my fonts and desktop resolution, the graphics filled up the entire screen and rendered the game unplayable.

OK, it took me a whole week, but I finally wrote one

More info in this thread.

Version 1.03 is up. Nikos found that the game could get into a state where only a subset of songs would be rotated through. If you already grabbed the 580MB archive, you just need the individual czk.hex file, as the graphics and sound blobs haven't changed.

Download link at the Internet Archive: <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/Cryptozookeeper">http://www.archive.org/details/Cryptozookeeper</a>

Oh dear... do the savegames for the old version still work for this new version?

EDIT - No they don't. What exactly am I missing out on by playing the original release?

If you like hearing the same 4 songs over and over and over again, with no means of escaping repeat-hell, then you can stick to the original release

PS:
This is a good example of why one should play with command recording enabled (not transcript recording, but only command recording.) That way, you can "restore" your game without needing the save file. You just replay the recorded commands:

>RECORD
[choose a file to record to]

>PLAYBACK
[choose a file to play back from]

Going to the same game position after a game update, becomes possible that way (if of course the new version doesn't change something that would give different results for the recorded commands.)

And if the game doesn't have random elements, which this one does. And if during my gameplay session I don't save/restore a LOT, which I did and often do.

At any rate, if I did that with every game that would mean I would have no faith in the author to have provided a bug-free experience. If I can't do that, I'll either be waiting eternally for the optimum game-fix or just wonder about whether *this* or *that* is a bug, a feature or just some crazy s**t the author cooked up. That would be beta-testing, and I swore off beta-testing because it's too much like work and not enough as fun as game-playing.

Yeah, REPLAY just doesn't work out of the box. It helped here though. I had to manually intervene and edit the text file. But still faster than playing from the beginning; at worst, the replay file serves as a guide to play through in a few minutes.

I wonder why no one ever bothered writing extensions for different IF systems that implement a non-VM save/restore (like you get with non-IF games; imagine if you had to restart every time there was a patch to Oblivion or Grand Theft Auto...)

Nikos explained it, but I'll go into more detail, perhaps some future IF developer can learn from my mistake here.

So, there's 70 songs in the game. Most of them came from me listening to hours of Creatve Commons-licensed music with tags like "ambient" and "electronica" and "no vocals." (An aside: there was nothing more frustrating in developing this game than clicking on a song with the "ambient" tag and hearing vocals. I also had some words when this happened.)

A couple songs were from the band Butterworth. Butterworth is made up of Gerrit Hamilton (who played Vest) and Andy Highsmith. The songs - "Puppy" and "Pursed Lips" had vocals, but if you listen to them, they quickly reveal themselves as the sort of songs where you're not really focusing on the vocals, as they tend to repeat a bit.

Those two songs do crack me up, so I thought it would be good compromise if the game only ever played them once. This was before Jon Blask encouraged me to make the >fastforward command. Anyway, so we're not here all day, I wanted, when "Puppy" and "Pursed Lips" came on twice, for the game to pick one of four other songs. The error I introduced is that once that condition came to be true, it would choose from one of those four songs for the rest of the game.

Since >fastforward was in there anyway, I just removed all the code to check for duplicates of the Butterworth songs, and we should be good to go for 1.03.

If I were ever to make a long game again, which I won't, ha ha, I would at least implement some sort of checkpoint system just for this. I get why Graham, Mike and Kent didn't put cross-patch saves in place, but it wouldn't be too much effort for me to dump what the player is carrying, and the states of various variables into a file, and then implement a new kind of restore that picks you up and populates the various variables for the game's state. I do a lot of checks on "is visited" in my games, so I'd have to find a way to dump that info for every room in the game, but it seems to not be too difficult if the game were large enough to make it worthwhile. Wish I had considered it in 2006.

great name for the game!

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