ADRIFT

Last updated
ADRIFT
Original author(s) Campbell Wild
Developer(s) Campbell Wild
Stable release
5.0 release 36 / September 12, 2020;3 years ago (2020-09-12)
Operating system Microsoft Windows
Available inEnglish
Type interactive fiction development and play
License BSD 3-Clause (BSD licenses)
Website www.adrift.co OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

ADRIFT [1] is a graphical user interface used to create and play text adventures. [2] [3] The name is an acronym for "Adventure Development & Runner - Interactive Fiction Toolkit". The project was solely developed by Campbell Wild until he made it open source in 2018. [4] Since then, only minor contributions to the main programs (Developer and Runner) have been given by others, though there have been contributions elsewhere to alternative Runners [5] [6] and the default Standard Library. [7]

Contents

The toolkit consists of two programs; a developer (used to write games - known as the generator before ADRIFT 5), and a runner (used to play them), though the runner is available to download separately. In the current stable release (version 5.0.36), released in 2020, both programs only run on Microsoft Windows platforms as they are written in Visual Basic. ADRIFT started out as shareware. When ADRIFT 5 was released it became donationware until it became open source. For a while ADRIFT 5 was able to run on Linux using the Mono project but later updates did not work properly with Mono so these versions were skipped.

Coinciding with the 2011 Interactive Fiction competition, ADRIFT WebRunner was launched. This allows ADRIFT 5 games to be played online. Because the game runs server side, it allows games to be played on any device such as iPad. ADRIFT 5 went into Beta [8] status as from 4 April 2011, where it became open for everyone to download. [9]

Unlike many text adventure creation tools (such as TADS), the author needs little knowledge of how to program to use the ADRIFT Developer. Instead, the author is presented with a simple graphical interface with which to write their game. [10] This allows for text adventures to be written more quickly by people who are primarily authors rather than programmers. [11]

Two of the most critically acclaimed ADRIFT games to date are The PK Girl, which achieved 6th place in the Interactive Fiction Competition in 2002, [12] and A Fine Day for Reaping, which took 7th place in the Interactive Fiction Competition [13] and won the XYZZY Award for Best Story in 2007. [14]

Other Operating Systems

Because ADRIFT only natively runs on Windows, many users on other operating systems are unable to run the original software. jAsea is an open-source Java application that runs ADRIFT 4 games. It allows anyone with a Java-enabled web browser regardless of platform to play ADRIFT games. Development of jAsea was discontinued in 2004. However, SCARE is an ANSI/ISO C secondary clone of jAsea and the project has resulted in the ability to play ADRIFT games on several platforms including Linux, Windows, DOS, Macintosh and Amiga. [15] SCARE has become a standard interpreter in most multi-interpreter programs such as Gargoyle [16] and Fabularium. Fabularium, furthermore, comes with an ADRIFT 5 interpreter called BEBEK. [5] Furthermore, ADRIFT 5 games can be played on Linux and Mac using a new interpreter called FrankenDrift. [6]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Interactive fiction</span> Nonlinear narratives set by audience decisions

Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of interactive narratives or interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "text-only", however, graphic text adventures still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles.

In computing, Xyzzy is sometimes used as a metasyntactic variable or as a video game cheat code. Xyzzy comes from the Colossal Cave Adventure computer game, where it is the first "magic string" that most players encounter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wine (software)</span> Windows compatibility software

Wine is a free and open-source compatibility layer that aims to allow application software and computer games developed for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like operating systems. Wine also provides a software library, named Winelib, against which developers can compile Windows applications to help port them to Unix-like systems.

Inform is a programming language and design system for interactive fiction originally created in 1993 by Graham Nelson. Inform can generate programs designed for the Z-code or Glulx virtual machines. Versions 1 through 5 were released between 1993 and 1996. Around 1996, Nelson rewrote Inform from first principles to create version 6. Over the following decade, version 6 became reasonably stable and a popular language for writing interactive fiction. In 2006, Nelson released Inform 7, a completely new language based on principles of natural language and a new set of tools based around a book-publishing metaphor.

Text Adventure Development System (TADS) is a prototype-based domain-specific programming language and set of standard libraries for creating interactive fiction (IF) games.

<i>Colossal Cave Adventure</i> 1976 video game

Colossal Cave Adventure is a text-based adventure game, released in 1976 by developer Will Crowther for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. It was expanded upon in 1977 by Don Woods. In the game, the player explores a cave system rumored to be filled with treasure and gold. The game is composed of dozens of locations, and the player moves between these locations and interacts with objects in them by typing one- or two-word commands which are interpreted by the game's natural language input system. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's attempted actions. It is the first well-known example of interactive fiction, as well as the first well-known adventure game, for which it was also the namesake.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft XNA</span> Freeware set of tools by Microsoft

Microsoft XNA is a freeware set of tools with a managed runtime environment that Microsoft developed to facilitate video game development. XNA is based on .NET Framework, with versions that run on Windows and Xbox 360. XNA Game Studio can help develop XNA games. The XNA toolset was announced on March 24, 2004, at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, California. A first Community Technology Preview of XNA Build was released on March 14, 2006.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Plotkin</span> Interactive fiction programmer and writer

Andrew Plotkin, also known as Zarf, is a central figure in the modern interactive fiction (IF) community. Having both written a number of award-winning games and developed a range of new file formats, interpreters, and other utilities for the design, production, and running of IF games, Plotkin is widely recognised for both his creative and his technical contributions to the homebrew IF scene.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adventure Game Studio</span>

Adventure Game Studio (AGS) is an open source development tool primarily used to create graphic adventure games. It is aimed at intermediate-level game designers, and combines an integrated development environment (IDE) with a scripting language based on the C programming language to process game logic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emily Short</span> Interactive fiction writer

Emily Short is an interactive fiction (IF) writer and creative director of Failbetter Games, the studio behind Fallen London and its spinoffs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset</span>

The Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset (ELKS), formerly known as Linux-8086, is a Linux-like operating system kernel. It is a subset of the Linux kernel, intended for 16-bit computers with limited processor and memory resources such as machines powered by Intel 8086 and compatible microprocessors not supported by 32-bit Linux.

The Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) is a technology used in certain computer operating systems for programs that need to, among other things, analyze network traffic. It provides a raw interface to data link layers, permitting raw link-layer packets to be sent and received. In addition, if the driver for the network interface supports promiscuous mode, it allows the interface to be put into that mode so that all packets on the network can be received, even those destined to other hosts.

Cocos2d is an open-source game development framework for creating 2D games and other graphical software for iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, HarmonyOS, OpenHarmony and web platforms. It is written in C++ and provides bindings for various programming languages, including C++, C#, Lua, and JavaScript. The framework offers a wide range of features, including physics, particle systems, skeletal animations, tile maps, and others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simple and Fast Multimedia Library</span> Graphics and Multimedia Library written in C++

Simple and Fast Multimedia Library (SFML) is a cross-platform software development library designed to provide a simple application programming interface (API) to various multimedia components in computers. It is written in C++ with bindings available for Ada, C, Crystal, D, Euphoria, Go, Java, Julia, .NET, Nim, OCaml, Python, Ruby, and Rust. Experimental mobile ports were made available for Android and iOS with the release of SFML 2.2.

mpv (media player) Free and open-source media player software

mpv is free and open-source media player software based on MPlayer, mplayer2 and FFmpeg. It runs on several operating systems, including Unix-like operating systems and Microsoft Windows, along with having an Android port called mpv-android. It is cross-platform, running on ARM, PowerPC, x86/IA-32, x86-64, and MIPS architecture.

MonoGame is a free and open source C# framework used by game developers to make games for multiple platforms and other systems. It is also used to make Windows and Windows Phone games run on other systems. It supports iOS, Android, macOS, tvOS, Linux, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PlayStation Vita, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. It implements the Microsoft XNA 4 application programming interface (API). It has been used for several games, including Bastion, Celeste,Fez, and Stardew Valley.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Windows Subsystem for Linux</span> Compatibility layer for running Linux binary executables natively on Windows

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a feature of Windows that allows developers to run a Linux environment without the need for a separate virtual machine or dual booting. There are two versions of WSL: WSL 1 and WSL 2. WSL 1 was first released on August 2, 2016, and acts as a compatibility layer for running Linux binary executables by implementing Linux system calls on the Windows kernel. It is available on Windows 10, Windows 10 LTSB/LTSC, Windows 11, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server 2022.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GDevelop</span> Open-source, cross-platform game engine

GDevelop is a 2D and 3D cross-platform, free and open-source game engine, which mainly focuses on creating PC and mobile games, as well as HTML5 games playable in the browser. Created by Florian Rival, a software engineer at Google, GDevelop is mainly aimed at non-programmers and game developers of all skillsets, employing event based visual programming similar to engines like Construct, Stencyl, and Tynker.

References

  1. ↑ "ADRIFT's entry on ifwiki.org"
  2. ↑ "Interactive Fiction Communities: From Preservation through Promotion and Beyond".
  3. ↑ "Rule-Based Interactive Fiction (Full Presentation)". CiteSeerX   10.1.1.360.3604 .
  4. ↑ "Pull requests · jcwild/ADRIFT-5". GitHub. 13 July 2021. Retrieved 2021-09-17.
  5. 1 2 "Fabularium: Interactive Fiction - Apps on Google Play". play.google.com. Retrieved 2021-09-17.
  6. 1 2 "GitHub - awlck/frankendrift: Cross-platform frontend for the ADRIFT Runner". GitHub. 12 August 2021. Retrieved 2021-09-17.
  7. ↑ "GitHub - kpeamon/ADRIFT-5: Updated library files for use with ADRIFT 5". GitHub. Retrieved 2021-09-17.
  8. ↑ "ADRIFT 5.0 Information page"
  9. ↑ "ADRIFT 5 Progress Blog"
  10. ↑ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-09-30. Retrieved 2015-07-30.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  11. ↑ "Brass Lantern - Easy Interactive Fiction Languages"
  12. ↑ IF Competition 2002 Results
  13. ↑ IF Competition 2007 Results
  14. ↑ XYZZY Awards 2007 Results
  15. ↑ "ADRIFT Clones". ADRIFT. 2004. Archived from the original on 2005-02-11.
  16. ↑ "Gargoyle : Interactive Fiction". ccxvii.net. Retrieved 2021-09-17.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.