Four years of sight reading practice (sandrock.co.za)
60 points by chthonicdaemon 3d ago 24 comments
Direct TLS can speed up your connections (marc-bowes.com)
68 points by tanelpoder 8h ago 23 comments
Planetfall
159 milliams 32 5/22/2025, 9:17:57 AM somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com ↗
Are you the author of the web site? Please make sure the PgDn key works for scrolling through the page. At the moment it switches images which are just barely on the screen.
There's a surprising amount of resources that aren't dead links regarding infocom stuff.
https://ifcomp.org/
Since Infocom games run on everything from a Palm Pilot to a mainframe, there's no reason for them to ever go away, as long as we can find people still interested in building Z-Machines for the latest gear.
For all of our modern-day high-powered GPU babble, the Infocom games still have the best graphics possible.
I recently started playing Zork I again on a C-64 emulator, and it really holds up.
The key is to play like you would in the old days: No distractions. Be patient and thoughtful. And actually read everything on the screen, instead of skimming the text.
Since we're now trained to have the attention spans of methed-out ferrets, it can be hard. My tips are to turn the phone completely off, put it in another room, and turn down the lights. Also, do you map by hand on grid paper with a pencil.
Lately, I've seen people bragging about video games providing value because they take 40 or 50 hours to complete. An Infocom game could easily take days, weeks, or months to really explore and appreciate thoroughly.
Zork is great. Everything seemed to click into place at the end.
I had incredible memories of zork zero but wow, that shit is opaque. I unashamedly used a guide when I got stuck and it took forever still.
As an example for the latter: at a certain point in the game Okami, you have to get an item from a crying boy you are friends with. You get rather obvious hints the boy has the item. You can talk with him a bunch, and the first few times you get different dialogue. You get more unique dialogue if you try it at night.
He would not give me the item. I spent probably two hours first meticulously combing the area and then backtracking throughout the entire world, talking with most of the important NPCs in hope I missed something. I even thought I might have somehow softlocked or corrupted my savegame.
The solution I never figured out and got from a walkthrough: you have to attack the crying boy. Again, the game gives zero hints or indication you have to do this.
If u compare the zork and zero walk thru you'll get it. I love the added color and illustrations and world far more than other text games but when I finished it(I was recording) I said "this game should probably be illegal. I cant quit this quick enough!". Still nostalgic tho, and fun in that "I got thru it" way.
So I very much relate to your experience. The text parser can be picky too when you know what to do but the game has its own way of doing it. Then u miss the solution.(edit: typos)
But SMAC was in its day quite divisive. Some Civ fans (self included) weren't able to get into the world with unfamiliar tech tree, obscure terrain features and the whole nomenclature of the game just being so... alien.
Now, granted it was likely the best sci-fi turn based title ever made but at the time us fans of Sid's work were really craving for a sequel to CivII and as a result SMAC received a somewhat lukewarm welcome. Likely undeservedly so.
https://somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/about/
The long version is even better:
https://somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/on-salva...
On my list, Alpha Centauri easily makes it on top 5 games ever made.
Thank you for the trip to memory lane. <goes to GOG to download the game>
One shortcoming is that its land texture doesn't show any contrasty edges, everything smoothly flows into other regions. We see the mountains but the textures pretty much ignore them and the edges that we see in our planet's texture are missing.
That said, I do appreciate the work that went into this, it looks very cool.
Surely there was a more automated solution than to do something 8k times manually?
yes he does