Old Adventure creation System brought back to life (DAAD)

Hi,

Looks like an interesting story, but I‘ve to admit I never heard of it …

http://8-bit.info/infinite-imaginations-aventuras-ad/

Jens

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DAAD was very popular in the 80-90 in Spain. It is a derivation of PAWS specially tailored for the company Aventuras AD. So it had tweaks to support Spanish, images and to be able to export games to the common platforms.
Spanish community is quite active and it has been releasing some games under this system, even expanding it.
The resulting DAAD is here by a common effort to recover this software. A big hoorray to them

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Very interesting. The fact that you can easily publish the same game for multiple platforms is a good perk of using this system. I was under the impression that DAAD and SWAN were the same thing. Guess not.

Hi, Stefan here… I’m the one who recovered the system together with Tim Gilberts, the original author and founder of Gilsoft / Infinite Imaginations. DAAD is basically a collection of DOS based tools and compilers that work with source files. The compiler transforms the sources to platform specific databases that can then be executed from the interpreters. Target platforms are: C64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, MSX, PCW, Atari ST, Amiga and MS-DOS. DAAD is also the most advanced tool to emerge from the heritage of Gilsoft. It is far superior to PAWs. I wouldn’t go as far and state that it is a PAWs derivate as DAAD is basically tailored for professional developers and does many things differently but there are some similarites, especially the scripting language. It offers so much more possibilities and a sophisticated parser in both Spanish and English that may be easily classified on-par with Infocom games. I recently released an addon to allow games to be written in the German language also. Since we made many additions to the 2018 release, you may choose to work with a modern environment. We crafted a syntax highlighter for Visual Studio Code that allows you to create your DAAD adventures. My adventure Hibernated (which was recently featured in the Zzap!64 annual) was written with DAAD https://8bitgames.itch.io/hibernated1

SWAN was very different as it offered a polished icon-driven interface. The SWAN system was Atari ST based as Fergus McNeill worked exclusively on that platform. The system was pretty much tailored to his needs. Fergus already gave his blessing, so WE ARE in fact going to release SWAN at some point down the road.

Feel free to post any questions that may arise when working with the system.

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hi,
Are there examples to use adject1 ; I can not find the solution :[code]/VOC
APPLE 101 noun
EAT 32 verb
RED 10 adjective

/MTX
/0
Very good!

/OTX
/1
A red apple

/OBJ
;obj starts weight c w 5 4 3 2 1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 noun adjective
/1 1 1 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ APPLE RED

/PRO 5
EAT APPLE ADJECT1 RED
MES 0
DONE[/code]

I can eat apple red but i can’t eat red apple!

Makes sense, since in Spanish adjectives usually follow the noun.

I was wrong about that; I was using the wrong interpreter.
I got an answer from the 8-bit era:

Wow, I’m really glad to see DAAD mentioned here! It’s an important piece of history in the Spanish IF scene, but I like to see it mentioned in the general IF scene, since DAAD could be well considered the pinnacle of PAWS-like authoring tools (homebrew excluded).

In the last days of Aventuras AD, a reduced version was awarded to the winners of a competition sponsored by one of the most important spanish computing magazines, MicroHobby, yet none of those versions ever surfaced.

It was a shot of luck that made DAAD available at large: In 2013, Andres Samudio, Aventuras AD founder and CEO, lended material for a retrocomputing exhibition organized by the AUIC society (a society of classic computer users) and there, the working disks of DAAD were spotted. Pedro (Rockersuke) asked Andres if he would lend those disks to preserve them and if he would be willing to release DAAD to the public.

Once the OK was granted, Jaime (Deepfb, Alt) Soriano and Javi (Habi) Chocano painstakingly recovered the contents, which included the DAAD system and a great deal of historical bits, like master copies or the Aventuras AD games, along with lots of original source code. It was packaged, along with scans of the physical disks, and released in 2014.

There were missing parts due to damaged media (the C64 interpreter in particular, was irrecoverable) but the system was almost fully functional, you could develop adventures for almost all of the systems supported, and there were also some english interpreters. Even though the original english templates where nowhere to be found, some enthusiasts built english tests from scratch, ensuring that the system was in fact operational.

Tim Gilberts was contacted about the C64 interpreter… and then Stefan seemed to convince him to do more: not only the C64 spanish interpreter but any english missing pieces (templates and some interpreters) where recovered, and Stefan ported his Hibernated game to the system, making the game available on a large set of classic computer systems.

Since then Tim has released through Stefan a new version of the compiler, which improves text compression. A spanish scene around DAAD has been moving recently, developing extensions to the system.

Hibernated has spearheaded DAAD into the english-speaking IF scene, it would be wonderful to see more authors using the system and releasing classic adventures on classic systems… if any of you ever consider to create a piece of IF with a PAWS-like parser, do not hesitate: take a look at DAAD, it would be worth the effort.

Andres Samudio has made a great gift to the community… without his generosity the system would probably have been lost forever. And of course let’s not forget Rockersuke’s quest to obtain the disks and permission to release, and Jaime and Javi, the preservers… It’s an adventure in itself! (and indeed it is… ‘Raiders of the Lost Parser’ (En busca del parser perdido) http://www.rockersuke.com/if/ebbp/ was created to show that the system was fully usable!)

Tim Gilberts seem to have been awakened by this, Stefan has been clicking the correct keys :wink: and thanks to that we have a new version of the compiler in almost 30 years! It’s packaged with the distribution he has on his site! (We still would like to see a release of SWAN and, why not? The sources for DAAD? :smiley: .

The system is classic, but it is very much alive!

PS: Mmmmm, isn’t Hibernated a prime candidate for a Spanish version…? :wink:

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FYI, if anybody here is curious about the DAAD system and wants to try a hand at it, we have started a Telegram group of DAAD users in English.

This is the invitation link: 8bit adventures (Telegram DAAD user’s group)

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I am curious about the DAAD system and would like to check it out, so I was hoping to find a kind of Getting-Started-Manual. I don’t speak Spanish. I hope to target at least Commodore 64 with graphics to begin with. I don’t mind using Adventuron to write the game or to use DAAD directly if that is better.

Would DAAD users be interested in helping newcomers here on intfiction.org or do I have to become a member of the closed Telegram group mentioned above?

I wouldn’t have thought that DAAD would give you too many issues, Denk; especially as you’re proficient with ADRIFT etc. It does help if you have previous experience with the Quill or the PAW, the Gilsoft systems share a common language, but it’s all basic input matching “condition-action” routines. The only slightly complicated bits are the source document structure and compiling/building the game… but Uto’s tools, such as DAADready!, take care of that side of things.

No need to be Spanish speaking. It’s all fully available in English and there are various references sources out there. https://github.com/daad-adventure-writer/DRC/wiki If you get stuck then there are lots of Quill/PAW/DAAD users around that can help.

Although using Adventuron to make a DAAD game is easy, if all you want to do is make a DAAD game then I would say work with DAAD directly.

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Thank you for the link. I guess my biggest problem was were to begin, because there seems to be several DAAD tools scattered around. I wasn’t aware of the DRC and thought I was going to use DosBox or something like that to run DAAD.

Yeah, DRC is a newer version of the DAAD compiler. It offers quite a few advantages of the old, original compiler that (unless you are a real purist) make it the best tool to use; benefits include a tweaked syntax that reduces the amount of coding you need to do and integration with Uto’s other tools like Maluva. It does use a slightly different syntax in the source file, but it’s fairly easy to get to grips with.

Uto’s DAADready! works with DRC to quickly compile your game and launch it in a suitable emulator… making the code & test loop very fast… much quicker than what I had set up for the original DAAD and pretty much as quick as my inPAWs/PAWs prototyping set-up.

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DAAD Ready is an excellent way to get started, and comes with a number of templates, and Uto has put together a brilliant package that makes debugging much easier than ever before (without DOSBox too).

Adventuron is also (well documented) path that can export code to DAAD ready (with graphics if you wish too).

The following tutorial leads into an (export to DAAD) tutorial. Overall both tutorials together should take an hour.

https://adventuron.io/documentation/tutorial-a.html

The Adventuron path will not allow you to use the more advanced features as DAAD, as only the commonality is mapped, but it can still deal with full sentence parsing.

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I was also puzzled by DRC. I was expecting a main menu such as GAC, QUILL and PAW on the Commodore 64. It was first when I downloaded DAADready, which contained a very good INSTRUCTIONS.html that I understood what I was supposed to do. Yes, DAADready is really great. I have managed to create a very small sample game with location graphics. The c64 loads the graphics very slow, but I could publish to more platforms - I am sure some of them are faster than the c64.

I have a few questions:

  1. Is it possible to only display a picture when some restrictions are fulfilled?
  2. And can the same picture be used in more than one location without adding multiple copies of the same picture in the IMAGES-folder? (I can imagine that doing that will take up a lot of space on the disk image)

Yes, unlike the Quill or GAC, DAAD doesn’t use a menu-driven editor, but rather compiles a game from a source file. This is actually how the CP/M version of the PAW worked and DAAD has a lot of shared DNA with that program.

I’ve not done too much with bitmap graphics & DAAD. DAAD does have its own vector-based graphics tool, similar to the Illustrator, but the bitmap graphics are powered by Uto’s Maluva extension. As you say, it’s slow on the C64 down to that computer’s very (very) slow disk drive… You will get faster results on other machines.

You can load in specific pictures using the XPICTURE condact. See… https://github.com/daad-adventure-writer/MALUVA/wiki#function-0--xpicture

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Yes, you can set conditions for the pictures to display and also use single pictures for multiple locations. If I were to do that personally, then I’d look at replacing the section of the standard DAAD source that calls the Maluva location pictures with my own customised routine/process. Then I would be able to override the default location pictures etc. after checking for certain conditions.

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So rather than have this…

> _ _ XPICTURE @38 ; [Player location]

…which displays the picture associated with each location automatically, you might call a process where it manually selects the picture… allowing you to check for conditions…

e.g.

> _       _     AT 1
                   XPICTURE 1

> _       _    AT 2
                  XPICTURE 1

> _       _    AT 3
                  NOTZERO 70 ; is the dog there?
                  XPICTURE 2 ; show the picture with the dog

> _       _    AT 3
                  ZERO 70
                  XPICTURE 3 ; show the picture without the dog

(but there are lots of ways to do this)

Edit: On a related note, Stefan published the source for his Rabenstein adventure which I’m sure would be worth looking at for anyone who is using DRC/DAADready! to make their own games… https://github.com/ByteProject/Rabenstein

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This is really great news and info! Thanks. I will probably be back here later with a few questions but right now I have enough to play around with :smiley:

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Does anyone know if there are any plans to add more target machines or release more of the source code so that others could potentially do so?