intfiction.org

I'm working on a game - no, strike that, I'm working on the engine for a game. The gist of it is a hacking game - hack into a secure network, uncovering facts and secrets as you go, and so on. The majority of the game will be spent at the command line, thus this poll.
Note that it won't require any hacking skills; probably some neat extras if you know where to look, but otherwise, the game should help you through the commands and syntax.

I used to be comfortable with the DOS command line, years ago, when I used DOS ...

Not sure where that fits in the poll. Maybe it puts me at the "cheat-sheet" level, since I only remember about half of the commands I used regularly in those days.

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Never used the command line much, other than for navigation, really. a: to switch to the floppy, setup.bat or install.exe, then c:, cd sierra, cd PQ1, pq1.bat to start the game. cd\ for getting back to c:\, dir and dir*.* and dir/p for directory listings... the most arcane commands I used were "view" and "edit".

I was always, and still am, perfectly comfortable with it (in fact, I need to use it to de-blorb some games so I can play them on ZaxMidlet). I guess I used it at the most basic level, but never needed a cheat sheet, othen than when I was learning.

Oh, and let's not forget memmkr. My life revolved around MemMaker for some of those games. As well as loading the mouse driver, and sometimes the sound driver, and...

...

...man, what a hassle THAT was.

I used the command line a while ago, and these days I use it very occasionally -- I have a couple Java applications that run through .jar files that open the Terminal window (this doesn't count, since I don't have to use it myself) and I have occasionally used it to telnet into a server to play SLASH'EM. And I used it a bit to try out that one TADS interpreter. Also I played Dunnet in the Terminal for a bit, until I got to the point where you have to, well, use the command line.

As far as the game goes, I put myself in the "I'll try it if you help me through" category. Dunnet and Virtuality (from the JayIsGames comp) felt too much like work. I can do command-line stuff if you tell me what I need to be doing, but I don't much enjoy being tossed into it willy-nilly. This applies to my actual computer as well as IF; when I hear "You can do such-and-so for Mac, but you have to run it from the command line," that usually leads me not to do such-and-so.

I use the CLI a lot, but only on Linux and Mac OS X. With both, I prefer the CLI for file management, searching and such. The Windows CLI is a nightmare to use, I stay away from it. It's very crude and extremely user unfriendly.

I voted for #1, since there's no middle ground between #1 and #2. I do own a mouse, and I like GUIs. I use them a lot. But also like the CLI.

I remember a little about using one - mostly navigational stuff. But it's been years and years now.

I'd be interested in the game as long as I could feel like a hacker - a cheat sheet may not cut it, since if I'm always referencing one, that's not really hacker-y. (On the other hand, it would take me back to the days when I had cheat sheets taped to my monitor. Good times.)

Oooooooh, I used to use ARJ for zipping and unzipping and fitting games into my floppies, all in DOS. THAT one had a lot of cheat sheets.

Ah, the memories.

I used DOS way-back-when. I missed it as everything started switching to Windows. I still remember the old commands (installed DOSbox a while ago, for some old software). I used a little VMS back in college.

But I never got the hang of unix or linux, and doing anything with accounts or privs (I assume an important part of a hacking game!) is pretty foreign to me. In general, my computer / math skills, beyond everyday stuff, are rusty from 15 years of disuse.

Sounds like a cool game concept. Let me know if you need any late-stage Beta testers. If I can get through it, probably most of your players can.


Conrad.

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Most likely, my game would have a HELP command much like is already in Windows - "HELP DIR" would show you how to use the "DIR" command, something like:


The commands themselves would be simplified Windows and Linux commands, probably without many switches (that is, as useful as dir /ah is, I'd probably only implement dir). I'm also trying to implement a smart tab-completion, so you can type (for example) "who" and hit tab, and it auto-completes to "whoami".

I'm hoping that the commands themselves will be simple enough that players will be able to use them without difficulty, but that there are enough commands with enough uses that it's not boring - spending an hour cd'ing through directories and listing files is not my idea of fun. Though, at this point, 99% of my time has gone into creating the parser, with only some scribbled notes on the actual plot... but, I want to get it right before I worry about actually putting plot-related information in it.

Though, plot-wise, I'm not intending the hacking to be hardcore - no drafting buffer overflows to break into web sessions, for instance. It'll mostly be like real hacking - using default passwords, or finding usernames and passwords left laying around, with only the occasional (and well hinted, to be sure) port scanning or IP-changing. Though I will throw in some interesting easter eggs for the more advanced players...

conradcook - sweet! Beta testing probably won't happen for a while yet, but I'll happily put your name down for when it does!

Is there a huge difference between command line interface and IF in general? I thought the latter was really just a simplified version of the former.