HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
Newsgroups: rec.arts.manga
Subject: Re: Viz's Ranma...
From: Matt Pyson <MRP105@psuvm.psu.edu>
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 21:01:35 EST
Organization: Penn State University

In article <tal691.727672897@huxley>, tal691@huxley.anu.edu.au (Tonio Loewald)
says:
> dlo@Bonnie.ICS.UCI.EDU writes:
>> Hello everyone! Does anyone know how far Viz is going to go with the Ranma
>> translations? I have no idea how far Viz has covered since I don't have any
>> of the original Japanese ones. How many issues will it take to cover the
>> entire series(persuming that Viz will do them all) and how long will it
>> take??
>
> As long as it sells....

Basically true. There are 23 volumes (going on 24) volumes of Ranma out in
Japan right now, so Viz can run Ranma for as long as they feel like it. (A
ballpark guess: continuous weekly publication for 2 or 3 years?) And since
they're doing Ranma as these 8-issue mini-series runs, they can just keep
putting out another mini-series until they start to lose their audience and the
sales slack off. At that point, they just don't announce a new 8-issue run,
quit, and sell compilations of previous issues to fans until the heat death of
the universe occurs.

> And may it sell forever! (risking a flame from the venerable E. Kontei!)
>
> Widya "Gerald Jones is the best!" Santoso

Is that Gerald "Yo! Suck on THIS, Old Man!" Jones? Heheheheheheheh :-)
---
|           Matt Pyson           | "I never liked you! You're always the hero |
| Internet: mrp105@psuvm.psu.edu |  and I'm always the villain! All right! If |
|     BITNET: MRP105 AT PSUVM    |  I'm the villain I'll take care of you     |
|   Quest Laboratories, H.R.D.   |  like a villain!" -- Daitokuji B-ko        |
From: chiu@ucsee.berkeley.edu (David Chiu)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.manga
Subject: Re: City Hunter
Date: 28 Jan 1993 05:23:16 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
NNTP-Posting-Host: ucsee.berkeley.edu
Summary: On a totally unrelated note...
Keywords: BASTARD, H Manga in general
Originator: chiu@ucsee.Berkeley.EDU

In article <1k5da9$44h@agate.berkeley.edu> ph111-dz@violet.berkeley.edu (david mou) writes:

>Q: If Hagiwara Kazushi decides to do a new manga after Bastard!, what would 
>be the corresponding new title in Chinese?

Inside an H manga named Count Down (by no less the famous 5-4-3-2-1 sensei;
Hiroyuki Utatane) is a page of congrad. from no one other than Mr. BASTARD
himself... (Not bad BTW... the H Manga that is)

>    dmou@orion.acs.uci.edu   ph111-dz@violet.berkeley.edu   studio 3x3  ^ ^
>
>       .... and just because I'm a fan doesn't mean I'm stupid!!  ^_^


Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
From: Russell L. Bryan <rbryan@Mail.trincoll.edu>
Subject: To all concerned
X-Xxmessage-Id: <00091AB1F9013175@downes1-117.dynamic.trincoll.edu>
X-Xxdate: Thu, 7 Jan 04 21:44:17 GMT
Organization: Starving Writers of America (sole member)
X-Useragent: Nuntius v1.1.1d12
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1993 18:25:36 GMT

I am now off of the net, and will only be able to check my mail and the
newsgroup once or twice a week.  However, any of you who have
correspondance with me, or with whom I am involved with beta testing,
don't stress if it takes a few days for me to get in touch with you --
I'm going to try to stay as involved as ever.

-- Russ
From: max@west.darkside.com (Erik Max Francis)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: Portal
Date: 21 Jan 93 08:00:46 GMT
Organization: The Dark Side of the Moon +1 408 245 SPAM

Is anyone familiar with the "game" Portal?  It wasn't really interactive 
fiction, as the only interaction that the user had was moving between the 
information retrieval services and checking to see if there was anything 
new.

The game told a story from the point of view of the user -- you -- who 
had returned from an interstellar trip to terraform another star system 
and had returned to Earth to find no humans left.  No bodies, no traces, 
nothing.  The only thing left is the rather extensive network that was 
maintained by humans.  The computers are run down, since nobody uses them 
anymore, and they don't have anything to do.

The game starts with you logging into a terminal, and the systems 
beginning to wake up.

I thought the game told a very interesting story.  Does anyone know 
anything more about it than I do, such as if the author of it has done 
anything similar, or for non-Mac machines?


Erik Max Francis  -)(-  ..!apple!uuwest!max  -)(-  max@west.darkside.com   __
USMail: 1070 Oakmont Dr. #1; San Jose, CA  95117  ICBM: 37 20 N 121 53 W  /  \
Like strategic games of interstellar conquest? . . . Ask about UNIVERSE!  \__/
-)(- Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt; all things that are, are lights. -)(-
From: brady@ucsu.Colorado.EDU (Sucks To Be Me)
Subject: Problems running "Beyond Zork"
Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 00:52:04 GMT

I have been having problems running BZ, in the LTOI I package. In the map mode
on my LC, instead of getting the map, all I got were symbols,numbers,letters,etcI supposed it had something to do with my color monitor, so I moved to a Classicwhere it worked fine. I played for a few hours and then quit for the day. But
now when I started it up on the Classic, the map was gone and the symbols,etc.
were in it's place. any idea what is causing this and how to solve it?

	Thanks,
		Sucks To Be Me
-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
			    |If you ever fall off the Sears Tower, just go real
Sucks to be Me  	    | limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and
                            | people will try to catch you because, hey,
From: MBS110@psuvm.psu.edu (Mark 'Mark' Sachs)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: Re: User-Selected Difficulty levels
Date: 26 Jan 93 21:31:56 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: The Leader Desslok School of Diplomacy

In article <81904@hydra.gatech.EDU>, ccocsme@prism.gatech.EDU (StatMan) says:

>I then wondered if I should let the player fully "win" the
>game at easier levels, or have the game leave the player
>with information that there was more to look foward to in
>the next level.

I would say, sure. If it takes more effort the reward would be bigger.
The only difficulty is in how to make a bigger reward... if the objective
is to destroy the evil General Helms's flying battleship, and you win the
game by overloading its reactor and blowing it up, it's hard to make a
"better" ending since that's what you do in every difficulty level.

Perhaps there could be a number of "successful" endings, with progressively
happier endings progressively more difficult to get to. Just escaping from
General Helms's battleship would be easier than disabling it so that his
world conquest plans are delayed, would be easier than destroying it totally...
et cetera. That might be a better way to handle it, as you wouldn't have
to muck around with checking the difficulty level before you do anything.

     "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, riddle them with bullets."
[Your blood pressure just went up.]        Mark Sachs IS: mbs110@psuvm.psu.edu
   DISCLAIMER: Penn State University cares about my money, not my opinions.
Organization: University Libraries - Technical Service, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1993 20:50:02 -0500 
From: Paul Christopher Workman <pw0l+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
	<C152v6.L99@rice.edu>

>The other problem is that storylines--indeed, the very concept of a
plot--would
>need to be reworked if there are two players competing for the same goals.
>One could really hose the other if puzzles are not carefully designed.
>...
>The problem is, though, that without certain well-defined puzzles, what you
>will end up with is a MUD like structure.  With certain well-defined puzzles,
>you have a situation where the players have managed to each put the other in
>a no-win situation.

Has there ever been a good analysis of what plot is under interactivity?
The standard for IF seems to be a string of puzzles, to be solved more
or less sequentially, with text distributed between the puzzles.  This
is easily conceptually parsed: text-puzzle-text-puzzle.....puzzle-text-YouWin.
(Which makes me wonder if anyone has ever made a parser/compiler for
IF which takes a text file -- I mean actual literary text and not
program code -- and produces a game as output.  But I digress.)

But this is a far cry from the plot used in actual fiction.  Certainly the
quality of literary elements varies, generally, with the quality of
the literary work itself (although the plot to a Mickey Spillane novel
might be more complex than that of "The Great Gatsby," the nature of
Fitzgerald's plot aspires to more), but in general the plot, or any
literary element, from fiction should allow the author to communicate
an idea or effect that's greater than just the sum of its (the element's)
parts.  Interactivity, one would think, abandons that since it abandons
the author's control over the plot; and the traditional IF-game
approach mentioned above, although it does allow tight control over
the progression of the plot (since the user can't, usually, go to
the next step until the puzzle preceeding it is completed), reduces
the plot *too* far, I think -- the plot is interactive only to the
extent that the user can solve puzzles.  That's not really what
your average fiction writer thinks of when you say "plot."  I've heard
reports of non-game interactive fiction (usually with respect to
StorySpace), but I've never had the opportunity to see it close up,
and anyway the reports suggest that the fiction produced is really
more like meta-fiction, which is fine for literary critics but not
much else.

Multi-user IF seems integral to the idea of IF, implicitly if not
explicitly.  (If an IF plot consists of the interplay between A, B, and C,
it shouldn't be a big difference if only A is human or if both A and B are.)
I would expect that if the true-plot-in-IF problem is solved, then
the multi-user IF problem would be solved immediately, as a result.

--paul


Xref: sparky rec.arts.int-fiction:1263 rec.games.int-fiction:1217
From: dmb@case.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction,rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: REQUEST: RePosting of INFOCOM Walkthrus?
Followup-To: rec.games.int-fiction
Date: 25 Jan 1993 06:17:45 GMT
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Reply-To: dmb@ai.mit.edu
NNTP-Posting-Host: case.ai.mit.edu

In article <schweda.727928220@vincent1.iastate.edu> schweda@iastate.edu (Christopher Schweda) writes:
>Several weeks ago I noticed that someone had posted numerous Infocom
>walkthrus to r.a.i-f. I failed to save them then and cannot retrieve them from
>my nn newsreader. Could someone please repost the whole batch of
>the walkthrus?

If you have FTP access you can grab them from the Interactive Fiction
Archive:

	ftp.gmd.de: if-archive/solutions

There's more there than you can imagine!

(Follow-ups to r.g.i-f)

Dave Baggett
__
dmb@ai.mit.edu            Natural Language Processing            MIT AI Lab                                                                                  
ADVENTIONS: We make Kuul text adventures!  Ask about Unnkulian 1, 2, 0, 1/2
  PO Box 851 Columbia, MD 21044 USA / CIS: 76440,2671 / GEnie: ADVENTIONS
From: vcwp@doc.ic.ac.uk (Vincent Chun Wai Poon)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: References on adventure games
Date: 27 Jan 1993 11:05:57 -0000
Organization: Department of Computing, Imperial College, University of London, UK.
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: oak48.doc.ic.ac.uk

This time I am going to ask for ELECTRONIC text or journals for adventure games or IF,
the THEORY behind it, how it is developed, anything that u think it is useful in writing
adventure games will be appreciated. This is because I am doing a project about writing 
adventure games but my superviser wants me to find some books which describe the theory and
various aspects of adventure games. I looked into our library (schoolwork oriented), so
nothing can be found like that and those I have heard could at FAQ could not be found off-
hand.

So I would appreciate if someone could suggest any electronic articles that are appropiate.
Besides the articles already written, I would also like to see on what u people have to say 
about this topic, mainly the theory of adventure game, and your opinions will be more valuable
than the articles that have been previously written.

Thank you for your support,

you can either reply back in the newsgroup or send email to vcwp@doc.ic.ac.uk
From: amead@s.psych.uiuc.edu (Alan Mead)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: TADS: Have you implemented an alias command?
Date: 27 Jan 93 19:59:48 GMT
Article-I.D.: news.C1J3Jp.Lt4
Organization: UIUC Department of Psychology

I was just trying Jacob Weinstein's _Save Princeton_ (a neat start, I
like the on-line instructions)...

And I was thinking that I'd like to alias certain commands as others.
For instance, I keep hitting 'h' instead of 'l' (too much UNIX mail, I
guess).

Has anyone implemented an aliasing ability in TADS?  Using preparse(),
you could change any input into anything else, so conflicts need not
occur...

Just wondering.

-alan mead
From: vcwp@doc.ic.ac.uk (Vincent Chun Wai Poon)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: Adventure games Design
Date: 25 Jan 1993 15:41:44 -0000
Organization: Department of Computing, Imperial College, University of London, UK.
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: oak48.doc.ic.ac.uk
Summary: Interface design for graphical adventure games

Someone Suggested this newsgroup, so I post it here :)


Recently I have posted a news on asking how to write an adventure game generator for pc,
now I need to concerntrate on the design of what the adventure game itself should really look
like.

I was thinking of using FULL GRAPHICS support(ie no command-line input) and the gameplay     
should be done only by moving the mouse. I saw the ones in which they have some icons by
the side of the screen and each icon repreesents an action. I have also seen the ones where
it relies on the left and right mouse buttons only, where right button changes the mouse  
curosr to the different icons and left button means do it with that icon.

But I want to design something original (Actually that's what my superviser wants) and I want
to ask those who have imaginative ideas people if they could suggest some other alternative 
ways / layouts of the screen to deal with selecting the commands with the mouse.

Thanks.

Responses can be sent to the newsgroup or by email to vcwp@doc.ic.ac.uk

Any suggestions on any sort on designing an adventure game or an adventure game generator
will be greatly appreciated.

A note of thanks to all those who answered to my previous request.

PS do u know of any electronic articles available through the net which write about making 
adventure games?
From: mroberts@hinrg.starconn.com (Mike Roberts)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: Realism in IF (was Disch's _Amnesia_)
Distribution: world
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 93 20:05:33 GMT
Organization: High Energy Software, Palo Alto, California


In article <neilg.727737126@sfu.ca> neilg@fraser.sfu.ca writes:

 > But what about responses like "You decide not to pick up the book
 > off the table" or "You find a pair of binoculars, which you take"?
 > ... Do you feel like saying "Take the book anyway, dammit!"

My favorite example of irritating messages like this is in King's
Quest n (where n ~ 5).  For pretty much anything you attempt to do,
the game responds "You don't have time for that" or "Not in that dress!"
(which suggests that perhaps there's a "take off dress" command, but no:
"Not with the players watching!").  For reasons of practicality and
playability, a game designer certainly can't and doesn't want to allow
the player to do (even nearly) all the things that would be reasonable
in the real world the game is simulating.  There's something of an art
to creating the excuses for why the player can't do certain things,
and there's an even more subtle art to setting up the game in the first
place so as to minimize the number of excuses needed.


Mike Roberts                               mroberts@hinrg.starconn.com
High Energy Software                       415 493 2430 (Voice)
PO Box 50422, Palo Alto, CA 94303          415 493 2420 (BBS)

"Time to ring in the new year, and watch as it transforms itself
from a beautiful promise of tomorrow into the ugly reality of today."
   --- Lars Fusco
Organization: University Libraries - Technical Service, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 20:40:58 -0500 
From: Paul Christopher Workman <pw0l+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: Computer writes a book?
	<1993Jan26.100615.4218@pollux.lu.se>



>Sophisticated parser? Eliza? Most versions of Eliza are very
>simple-minded indeed and don't actually do any parsing, just pattern
>matching. 

Speaking of which, is there some public-domain English-language
parsing code out there I could ftp or such?  I want to write a 
(really weird) game generator which would need an English language
parser.

thanks,

--paul
From: schwarts@cps.msu.edu (Steven Eric Schwartz)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: High Energy Software/TADS
Date: 28 Jan 93 02:46:55 GMT
Reply-To: schwarts@cps.msu.edu (Steven Eric Schwartz)
Organization: Dept. of Computer Science, Michigan State University
NNTP-Posting-Host: atlantic.cps.msu.edu
Originator: schwarts@atlantic.cps.msu.edu

Mike,

I need your address to mail the NDA.


-- 
Steven Eric Schwartz            "It's not safe out here. It's wonderous, with
(schwarts@cps.msu.edu)           treasures to satiate desires both subtle and
125 East Wilson Hall, MSU        gross.  But it's not for the timid."
East Lansing, Michigan  48825                           - Q, "Q Who"
From: rusty@groan.Berkeley.EDU (Rusty Wright)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: multi-player IF [was Re: FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)]
Date: 21 Jan 93 09:24:20
Organization: Computer Center, UC Berkeley
	<C152v6.L99@rice.edu> <1993Jan20.155942.10580@Princeton.EDU>
NNTP-Posting-Host: groan.berkeley.edu
In-reply-to: jacobw@phoenix.Princeton.EDU's message of Wed, 20 Jan 1993 15:59:42 GMT

As one who has played on MUDs for several years, and who loves IF, my
guess is that the two won't really mix (multi-player IF).  The problem
is that when you get multiple players, there's a very strong
inclination to just sit around 	and shoot the breeze.  There's
something seductive about sitting in front of your
terminal/workstation in a text-based virtual reality room with people
from all over the country and globe.  Even if you're not much of a
talker, it can be fun just watching the other conversations.  There's
also a different set of ethics of behavior; just as people in cars are
less inhibited about being rude, in multi-user virtual realities
people are even more less inhibited because you know the other person
is miles away, and on top of that, your real identity isn't known (you
get to make up your player's name and description).  It's an area ripe
for research by the sociologists.

I think it boils down to the the problem that living, talking people
are invariably more interesting than some interactive fiction puzzle
or story.  Until we get some really good AI in our IF software, the IF
will always be more static in it's behavior, and therefore less
interesting, than people.

But I don't want to be a wet blanket; I still think people should try
because I'm sure some interesting things will come about from it.  And
99% of the text on MUDs (scenery, descriptions of things, etc.) is of
such a mediocre level of creativity and originality that it would be
nice to even inject some new blood, so to speak.  And maybe I'm just
plain wrong; maybe the reason MUDs haven't had any good IF for them is
that the vast majority of their players are people who are basically
uncreative and unoriginal.  I do remember some quite creative MUD
players, but for some reason their stuff never "caught on."  Maybe it
it just got drowned out by all the drek produced by the other players.
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
From: rivero@sol.cie.unizar.es (Alejandro Rivero)
Subject: Re: Computer writes a book?
Reply-To: rivero@sol.cie.unizar.es
Organization: Department of Theoretical Physics. University of Zaragoza
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 08:49:28 GMT

In article 25JAN199314110698@rigel.tamu.edu, spb0457@rigel.tamu.edu (SubGenius) writes:
 >
->+-------------------------------------SubG---------------------------------+
->There's at least one book authored by a computer I can think of--a thinnish
->volume that came out six or eight years back called _The Policeman's Beard
->is Half Constructed_ and, while most of it was on the ragged edge of
->comprehensibility I'd rate it far above any of J.S.'s efforts.  Because
->although it contained a good deal of repetition due to a conspicuously
->small vocabulary, it did deliver occasional jems like, `A black pig is
->like a tormented bat,' explained in tortuous logic, and the wild
->`inconsistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds,' which leads one to
->wonder what trash the programmers had been feeding their machine.
->

that was from RACTER, was it?  I read a reference to Racter in Scientific Amer.
time ago, probably in computer games. There was a Racter vs Eliza match, funny,
showing how RACTER routines can make fool a sophisticated parser as Eliza is.

The more important point about racter was the interactive version. He could 
speak with a human and take records of conversations for future use. A good
character to include in a game... 

I dont know if racter source is avalaible. In fact, I dont know if the program
is avalaible actually from any place. I have heard there are other projects running 
in internet, some of then in .ca areas, but I have not info about. Perhaps someone
there.

-Alejandro Rivero
->
->
->
->
->
->
->-SubGenius
->
->
->
From: jacobw@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Jacob Solomon Weinstein)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: Re: FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
Date: 20 Jan 93 15:59:42 GMT
Organization: Princeton University
Originator: news@nimaster

In article <C152v6.L99@rice.edu> adam@owlnet.rice.edu (Adam Justin Thornton) writes:
>
>The other problem is that storylines--indeed, the very concept of a plot--would
>need to be reworked if there are two players competing for the same goals.
>One could really hose the other if puzzles are not carefully designed.
...
>The problem is, though, that without certain well-defined puzzles, what you
>will end up with is a MUD like structure.  With certain well-defined puzzles,
>you have a situation where the players have managed to each put the other in
>a no-win situation.

Well, as you noted, the solution is to rework certain notions in IF. I
would say plots could be similar, but the puzzles would need to be
changed. Ideally, the players would have to work together. Consider the
following example, where we have two players, a and b:

You are in a room. A single door stands east.
PLAYER A>east
The door slams moments before you pass through it, swinging open again
only after you take a few steps backward.
PLAYER B> hold the door open
You stand behind the door and hold it tightly.
PLAYER A>east
As you pass through, the door trembles, but player B holds it tightly
in place.

It's not a great example, but I'm sure you see the potential that two-
player puzzles have. I think that a good two-player IF game is quite
feasible. I would think, though, that including an unlimited number of
players would almost invariably tend towards a MUD-like situation,
unless one were willing to create a highly detailed world. If one were
willing to do that, the players might have to agree on an overall
strategy, then spread out to various regions to accomplish their
sub-goals, rendezvousing at, say, the castle of the evil warlord.

Michael J. Roberts, if you're reading this: have you considered adding
multi-player capacity to TADS? It would require a large amount of
effort, I imagine, but it would be an incredible advantage.