* * * List of ALAN Games on IFDB * * *

[Tristano Ajmone]

Ciao!

 

In reply to Alan (the person) pointing out that the website game links are broken, out of date, etc., I started to work on gathering

a list of all the ALAN games that are out there.

 

Below is the list of games I've managed to compile, each linking to its IFDB page. The list might be incomplete, but at least it

contains all the games that I've come across using different tag-searches on IFDB, and cross-checks with Baf's Guide (now dead).

 

The next step will be deciding how to store these games on a dedicated GitHub repository — how do we organize them? by ALAN version?

by author? by locale? by title? and other technical issues that need to be addressed before setting up the repository.

 

I hope the list is going to be useful in the meantime.

 

Tristano

Games List

title	author	year	alan
A Matter of Time	Michael Zerbo and Vivian McAlexander	1995	2
A Very Hairy Fish-Mess	Byron Alexander Campbell	2009	3
Artifiction	Mikko Vuorinen	2002	2
Bugged	Anssi Räisänen	2001	2
Catch That Cat	Felix Pleșoianu	2010	3
CC	Mikko Vuorinen	1998	2
City of Dead Leaves	Felix Pleşoianu	2016	3
Coming Out of the Closet	Mikko Vuorinen	1998	2
Crystal Ball	Marian Taylor	1999	2
Dinnertime	Bob Reeves	1998	2
Don’t Be Late	Greg Ewing	1996	2
Enter the Dark	Peter R. Shushmaruk	2006	2
Even Bantams get the Blues	Eric Mayer	2001	2
Hermetisch verschlossen	Uwe Pilz	1997	2
IN-D-I-GO SOUL	Jonathan Blask	2011	3
King Arthur’s Night Out	Mikko Vuorinen	1999	2
Knot To Be Undone	Lelah Conrad	1999	2
Leaves	Mikko Vuorinen	1997	2
Lost In New York	Mikko Vuorinen	2000	2
Mazemapper	Bob Reeves	1999	2
No Earthly Use	Greg Ewing	2000	2
Ogres	Alan DeNiro	2003	2
On a Horse with No Name	Greg Ewing	2001	2
Onaar	Robert DeFord	2015	3
Oskar und der Tod	Uwe Pilz	1997	2
Out of the Study	Anssi Räisänen	2002	2
Papa wird vermißt	Ulrike Pilz and Uwe Pilz	1997	2
Puddles on the Path	Anssi Räisänen	2003	2
Room 206	Byron Alexander Campbell	2009	3
Sardoria	Anssi Räisänen	2003	2
Skipping Breakfast	Stephen Griffiths	1999	2
SpeedIF 11, part six	Mikko Vuorinen	2000	2
Ted Paladin And The Case Of The Abandoned House	Anssi Räisänen	2011	3
Ted Strikes Back	Anssi Räisänen	2017	3
The Adventures of the President of the United States	Mikko Vuorinen	2003	2
The Chasing	Anssi Räisänen	2001	2
The Christmas Party	OldGrover	2007	3
The HeBGB Horror!	Eric Mayer	1999	2
The Hollywood Murders	Michael Zerbo	1996	2
The Isolato Incident	Alan DeNiro	2001	2
The Mean Story	Bob Reeves	1999	2
The Ngah Angah School of Forbidden Wisdom	Anssi Räisänen	2008	3
The Sealed Room	Robert DeFord	2012	3
The Secret in the Mithraeum	Eric Mayer	1999	2
The Songbird, the Woman and the Silver Casket	Taryn Quinn	2015	3
The Story of Morris the Chicken Being Helped by a Squirrel	Mikko Vuorinen	1998	2
The Wyldkynd Project	Robert DeFord	2014	3
There Is No Bread	Mikko Vuorinen	2000	2
They’re After You!	Bob Reeves	1999	2
To Get To the Other Side	Bob Reeves	1999	2
To Otherwhere and Back	Greg Ewing	2001	2
Unity!	Greg Ewing	1998	2
VR Gambler	Robert DeFord	2017	3
Waldo’s Pie	Michael Arnaud	2005	3
Zero One	Edward Plant	2004	2

 

Tristano Ajmone (Italy)

==============================================================

IFDB profile page:

http://ifdb.tads.org/search?searchfor=author+Ajmone

--------------------------------------------------------------

Alan 3 Syntax for Sublime Text:

https://github.com/tajmone/sublime-alan

==============================================================

[Alan JOBERT]

Bonjour Tristano,

 In reply to Alan (the person) pointing out that the website game links are broken, out of date, etc., I started to work on gathering

a list of all the ALAN games that are out there.

It's a very good job. Many thanks !

 

The next step will be deciding how to store these games on a dedicated GitHub repository — how do we organize them? by ALAN version?

by author? by locale? by title? and other technical issues that need to be addressed before setting up the repository.

Looking at the database, I realize that most of the games are written in English. I think you're a better person than me to reply to this question, but if I'm not wrong, this is important to choose the interpreter version related to the game you want to play, isn't it ? I mean : can you play all games with version 3 of Alan, or you need to get the v2 interpreter to play the v2 compatible games ? If the interpreter to run is important, then I guess with will be a good option to create a repository (or directory) by version number. Then perhaps by language, even if for now 99% of the games are in English, then by author and title.

 

I hope the list is going to be useful in the meantime.

At least to show to people interested by ALAN like me that you can easily find existing games to play with this system. And off course for all the fans too.

Do you think this will be useful to maintain this list in HTML format on the website ? On a specific page ?

I don't think you have a new game coming out everyday so you (or someone else) won't be very busy with this task.
I will be glad if you can add a "Language" column in your table, for each game ;-)

Thanks !

Best regards,
Alan.

[Robert DeFord]

Looks great, Tristano. Lots of work! Thanks. As for sorting, I think that one consideration would be to somehow differentiate between Alan3  and Alan2 games, though sorting by release date would probably accomplish that just fine.

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-- 
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“Forgiving and being forgiven, loving and being loved, living and
letting live, is the simple basis for it all."
Ernest Holmes 1984

[tho...@alanif.se]

21 aug. 2022 kl. 16:59 skrev Tristano Ajmone <taj...@gmail.com>:

Ciao!

 

In reply to Alan (the person) pointing out that the website game links are broken, out of date, etc., I started to work on gathering

a list of all the ALAN games that are out there.

 

Below is the list of games I've managed to compile, each linking to its IFDB page. The list might be incomplete, but at least it

contains all the games that I've come across using different tag-searches on IFDB, and cross-checks with Baf's Guide (now dead).

 

The next step will be deciding how to store these games on a dedicated GitHub repository — how do we organize them? by ALAN version?

by author? by locale? by title? and other technical issues that need to be addressed before setting up the repository.

Good work, Tristano!

One approach could be to store this data in some free, online, database, like https://free.caspio.com (I haven't used this particular one). That would possibly provide good filtering capabilities.

Regular exports, which would be a prerequisite feature, would allow us to keep it in a well-known repo, like GitHub.

/Thomas

-- 

[Tristano Ajmone]

@Thomas:

>> Below is the list of games I've managed to compile, each linking to its IFDB page. The list might be incomplete, but at least it
>> contains all the games that I've come across using different tag-searches on IFDB, and cross-checks with Baf's Guide (now dead).
>>
>> The next step will be deciding how to store these games on a dedicated GitHub repository — how do we organize them? by ALAN version?
>> by author? by locale? by title? and other technical issues that need to be addressed before setting up the repository.

> Good work, Tristano!

> One approach could be to store this data in some free, online, database, like https://free.caspio.com <https://free.caspio.com/> (I haven't used this particular one). That would possibly provide good filtering capabilities.

Thanks for the link, I'll look into it. My only worries when it comes to free proprietary services is that they eventually
die out, leaving you back to square one when this happens — a good example is the old ALAN Yahoo list, which eventually
shut down, even though after decades, which left us with some exported data which we're having trouble to manage due to
the proprietary format.

> Regular exports, which would be a prerequisite feature, would allow us to keep it in a well-known repo, like GitHub.

We definitely need that, not only as a fail-safe in case the service is discontinued, but also to be able to reuse the
same data for other tools, the GitHub repository being just one example.

What did you have in mind to store in the database, just the metadata + external links or also the compiled adventures?
Since compiled adventures are fairly small in size (often small than a high-res JPG image) I don't think that storing
the adventure binaries in a database is going to be a problem. The problem is that often adventures come with multiple
files (resource files, feelies, walkthrough, license and README, etc.) which might then require storing everything in
a single Zip archive.

Most of the ALAN games seem to be stored at the IF Archive, but there some exceptions. E.g. I noticed that one of Anssi's
games links to his website instead of the IF Archive. From my experience, privately hosted adventures are those at the
higher risk of getting lost (website not being renewed, a server crash and lack of backups, etc.).

Therefore, for me the idea behind creating a dedicated repository was twofold:

1) Gather into a single centralized container all known ALAN adventures.
2) During this work also submit to the IF Archive any games that aren't there yet.

As for point (2), I've been submitting to the IF Archive lots of third party contents during the course of years, as a means
to prevent them from getting lost. When it comes to submitting contents which are not yours, the submission procedure is
slightly different, but having done this multiple times I know how to do it properly.

Another goal would be to offer the chance to authors who did not publish their games' source code to do so, so that
the source code doesn't get lost either. Of course, all of this can be achieved via the IF Archive, but with our own
repository we would have more freedom of action in terms of how to organize these contents, tweak them if required
(e.g. switching to UTF-8 source for ALAN 3), etc., whereas the IF Archive is more focused on archiving resources
"as they are" (although improved version are allowed, along side the originals).

@Robert DeFord:

> As for sorting, I think that one consideration would be to somehow differentiate between Alan3 and Alan2 games,
> though sorting by release date would probably accomplish that just fine.

I agree on the ALAN 2 v 3 separation. I'm not sure about the release date criteria though, although maybe just
the year would help.

The problem here is that we're dealing with a twofold classification problem. On the one hand, we're dealing with
how the directory tree is organized in terms of categories and folders name, hoping that their naming convention
and structure would make it easier for end users to navigate them and discover contents. On the other hand, there's
the problem of how to organize an "index" of all adventures based on data like its title, author, etc.

Ideally, a database would be the best solution, but since the total number of these adventures is so small is seems
a bit overkill to setup an entire database (except for free online ready-solutions, like pointed out by Thomas).
Yet the number of adventures is big enough to call for some sort of automated way to keep track of them and their
data, so that we could exploit this data to automatically produce the "index" (be it a markdown or HTML file in
the repository or its website, which provides direct links to the adventure files).

When it comes to metadata things get complicated by various factors. Some adventures have more than one release,
e.g. the original version submitted to a contest, and the updated version released after. Unique IFIDs (ISBN-like
identifiers) are not present in ALAN 2 games, only in ALAN 3 games created after a certain version — but event then,
these were not extracted by the IFDB/IF Archive tools due to lack of knowledge on how they were stored, so ultimately
you can see that most of these adventures are catalogues using the IFDB's own IF system, or using a IFID genereated
via the Babel suite tools, and there there's the true ALAN IFDB which is present in some of the latest ALAN games.
So, storing adventures in folders carrying their IFID as the folder name doesn't seem a good solution, although it
would have been the ideal solution if we dealt with uniquely identified adventures.

We could organize adventures in subfolders named after their authors, but I've noticed that there's at least one
adventure with multiple authors, so that won't work either.

Whatever the solution (coming hard with an arbitrary approach is not that hard) it's important to realize that
it needs to be a formal way of organizing adventures, so that we cam easily store in a file (or database) all
their metadata to update the repository/website indexes whenever new adventures are added. I imagine that such
and index document would need to list adventures in different ways: alphabetically, by title, by author(s),
and maybe by year/date of publication.

Probably an automated solution to generate these indexes is preferable to having to manually edit those files
each time, and less error prone. The solution could consist in a JSON file, which can then ben easily manipulated
in any language without requiring a database.

But then, of course, the fine-details about the stored data will ultimately depend on what we expect from these
indexes — just a link to the adventure folder? or a full list of all the available files?

The same considerations also apply to the online database solution, although much depends on whether this database
will just provide an external link or actually store the files (or a single Zip file for each adventure).

Tristano

[Anssi Räisänen]

@Tristano

>>Most of the ALAN games seem to be stored at the IF Archive, but there some exceptions. E.g. I noticed that one of Anssi's

games links to his website instead of the IF Archive.

Which game would that be? Actually, I don't have a personal website, nor have I had one in the past.  

-Anssi

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[Thomas Nilefalk]

------ Originalmeddelande ------
Från "Tristano Ajmone" <taj...@gmail.com>
Till ala...@googlegroups.com
Datum 2022-08-24 03:21:48
Ämne Re: [alan-if] * * * List of ALAN Games on IFDB * * *

>....

>
>What did you have in mind to store in the database, just the metadata + external links or also the compiled adventures?
>Since compiled adventures are fairly small in size (often small than a high-res JPG image) I don't think that storing
>the adventure binaries in a database is going to be a problem. The problem is that often adventures come with multiple
>files (resource files, feelies, walkthrough, license and README, etc.) which might then require storing everything in
>a single Zip archive.

I didn't really think it through but I think relying on the IF Archive
for storage and download is a good call, with direct links in the db.

My idea was just to provide a better UI for the type of lists that you,
Tristano, did, and the page I did many years ago, that started this
discussion.

>
>Most of the ALAN games seem to be stored at the IF Archive, but there some exceptions. E.g. I noticed that one of Anssi's
>games links to his website instead of the IF Archive. From my experience, privately hosted adventures are those at the
>higher risk of getting lost (website not being renewed, a server crash and lack of backups, etc.).
>
>Therefore, for me the idea behind creating a dedicated repository was twofold:
>
>1) Gather into a single centralized container all known ALAN adventures.
>2) During this work also submit to the IF Archive any games that aren't there yet.
>
>As for point (2), I've been submitting to the IF Archive lots of third party contents during the course of years, as a means
>to prevent them from getting lost. When it comes to submitting contents which are not yours, the submission procedure is
>slightly different, but having done this multiple times I know how to do it properly.

I think we should prioritize 2) over 1). The IF Archive is *the* central
repository of IF, to create an Alan-specific one should be done if there
is some extra value it would bring, otherwise, like you mentioned, try
to add missing works to the IF Archive.

>Another goal would be to offer the chance to authors who did not publish their games' source code to do so, so that
>the source code doesn't get lost either. Of course, all of this can be achieved via the IF Archive, but with our own
>repository we would have more freedom of action in terms of how to organize these contents, tweak them if required
>(e.g. switching to UTF-8 source for ALAN 3), etc., whereas the IF Archive is more focused on archiving resources "as they are" (although improved version are allowed, along side the originals).

This is something we at this point don't have, I think. But is somewhat
of a separate issue but could possibly be coordinated with other things,
but I think here a GitHUb repo could be the back-storage for it.

>@Robert DeFord:
>
>>As for sorting, I think that one consideration would be to somehow differentiate between Alan3 and Alan2 games, though sorting by release date would probably accomplish that just fine.
>
>I agree on the ALAN 2 v 3 separation. I'm not sure about the release date criteria though, although maybe just
>the year would help.

I haven't looked at the actual data, but classification in terms of Alan
version, and date are not necessarily correlated data, so we need them
both.

>The problem here is that we're dealing with a twofold classification problem. On the one hand, we're dealing with
>how the directory tree is organized in terms of categories and folders name, hoping that their naming convention and structure would make it easier for end users to navigate them and discover contents. On the other hand, there's
>the problem of how to organize an "index" of all adventures based on data like its title, author, etc.

This is why mind directly goes to lightweight databases. At least as a
type of "UI".

/Thomas

[Thomas Nilefalk]

A very quick Proof of Concept with Caspio:
https://c1hcx374.caspio.com/dp/21ebb00089dd7c098c8e49ceb535

You can use '%' as a wildcard in your searches. And yes, I'll fix
Anssi's surname ;-)

/Thomas


------ Originalmeddelande ------
Från "Thomas Nilefalk" <tho...@alanif.se>
Till ala...@googlegroups.com
Datum 2022-08-24 14:35:46
Ämne Re[2]: [alan-if] * * * List of ALAN Games on IFDB * * *

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[Tristano Ajmone]

@thomas:

> I didn't really think it through but I think relying on the IF Archive for storage and download is a good call, with direct links in the db.

> My idea was just to provide a better UI for the type of lists that you, Tristano, did, and the page I did many years ago, that started this discussion.

I agree on both points.

> A very quick Proof of Concept with Caspio: https://c1hcx374.caspio.com/dp/21ebb00089dd7c098c8e49ceb535

> You can use '%' as a wildcard in your searches. And yes, I'll fix Anssi's surname ;-)

I like the PoC found at the link. I thinks that's basically it, we don't really need more to it, it's just about being
able to access the full list of games and being able to filter it by various criteria.

>>Therefore, for me the idea behind creating a dedicated repository was twofold:
>>
>>1) Gather into a single centralized container all known ALAN adventures.
>>2) During this work also submit to the IF Archive any games that aren't there yet.
>>
>>As for point (2), I've been submitting to the IF Archive lots of third party contents during the course of years, as a means
>>to prevent them from getting lost. When it comes to submitting contents which are not yours, the submission procedure is
>>slightly different, but having done this multiple times I know how to do it properly.

> I think we should prioritize 2) over 1). The IF Archive is *the* central repository of IF, to create an Alan-specific one should be done if there is some extra value it would bring, otherwise, like you mentioned, try to add missing works to the IF Archive.

I've recently done something very similar for Italian IF assets which were at risk of becoming lost, so I created a dedicated
repository to store all missing material while submitting it to the IF Archive. The reason I wanted to use this intermediate
solution was to be able to engage with original authors (via Issues) for permissions of material without license, or to store
the original files in cases some tweaks were required (encoding fixes, polishing, etc.), so that I could include a link to
these original assets on GitHub in my submission requests to the IF Archive.

I would probably say that the only benefit in creating our own games archive would consist in being able to have it all in one
place, attach notes in README files, keep track of Discussions with authors, etc., but most of all it would allow ALAN users
to access all the games at once — i.e. by either cloning the repository or downloading a Zip file with the entire collection.

So, I'm still in favour of creating this repository, but maybe we should just keep it simple — split the collection into
ALAN 2 and ALAN 3 games (mostly because this might be an important criteria for those seeking to study source examples) and
then just store each game in a folder named using a "slug" of the game title (a short version, based on title keywords or
the initials of title words, etc.). This archive would still have a main README listing all games and their author names,
year of publication, etc., along with links to their IFDB page and IF Archive stored copies, but won't go as far the database
UI, which will remain the main reference for those who need to quickly sift through the games.

So we seem to agree on this too, since the above aligns with your previous comment:

> This is something we at this point don't have, I think. But is somewhat of a separate issue but could possibly be coordinated with other things, but I think here a GitHUb repo could be the back-storage for it.

Tristano Ajmone (Italy)

[Tristano Ajmone]

Sorry for my late reply to these questions, but for some reason this specific email is not present in my local email client (I guess that after reading it online it doesn't

get sent to my mail account any more). So, I remembered the questions but couldn't find them in the emails thread, and had to access the newsgroup online.

@Alan:

>  Looking at the database, I realize that most of the games are written in English. 

There are a few games in German too though!

> I think you're a better person than me to reply to this question, but if I'm not wrong, this is important to choose the interpreter version related to the game you want to play, isn't it ? 

> I mean : can you play all games with version 3 of Alan, or you need to get the v2 interpreter to play the v2 compatible games ?

It depends on what you use. The native ALAN interpreters (ARun, WinARun, etc.) are for the specific MAJOR version, so you'll need ARun v2 for games created with ALAN 2, and

ARun v3 for games created with ALAN 3. But if you use Gargoyle (with the ALAN drop-in extensions) then it can manage any ALAN version, just like it manages most of the

known IF formats that are out there.

I guess that from a player's point of view Gargoyle is the most attractive solution, not only because it can play all type of IF games, but also because it provides very nice fonts

and font rendering, and allows many user customizations of the UI, default colours, etc.

As a developer, I tend to use mainly the command line interpreter (ARun), and in the (rare) occasions when I need to check multimedia or font styles, then I use WinARun.

>  If the interpreter to run is important, then I guess with will be a good option to create a repository (or directory) by version number. 

I think that splitting the archive by ALAN version is important mostly because ALAN newbies might be looking for some game examples to study their source code,

so they'll be looking for ALAN 3 games in that case. From a development and maintenance point of view, this also makes sense if we want to setup up an automated

test suite (e.g. to check that all the games are actually playable at all times), and for this will be using different interpreters for ALAN 2 and ALAN 3 games, therefore

having them stored in separate folders simplifies creating the scripts for this task.

> Then perhaps by language, even if for now 99% of the games are in English, then by author and title.

Here things risk to become entangles when it comes to organizing subfolders according to some criteria. Definitely language might be a worth criteria, since

players will only be looking for games in a language they can understand, so it might make sense to further subdivide the folders by "locale" using the two-letter

shorthands (e.g. EN for English, DE for German, etc.). Bear in mind that we also have some Spanish and Italian demos, which are not present in the IFDB but are short

games in their own right. 

So, possibly up to this point we're looking at a directory structure like this one:

/alan-2/
.../de/
.../en/
/alan-3/
.../de/
.../en/
.../es/
.../it/

(sorry for the ugly directory representation, but multiple spaces are ignored in HTML previews so I used dots)

I'm not sure it's worth making further distinctions in terms of sub-foldering categories, because things could easily become entangled.

Unlike databases, we we can benefit from items belonging to multiple categories at once, such an approach would fail on disk. Just think

if we used authors' names to group games, what about games with multiple authors?

The "science" of organizing contents in an organic and systematic manner is called "Information Architecture", and has its roots in

biblioteconomy, i.e. the science of organizing book collections:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_architecture

Regardless of whether Information Architecture if being applied to paper books of digital contents, the same principles and challenges

hold true, as well as the solutions. Just like for books cataloguing, the ideal solution consists in having a unique identifier for each

publications, like ISBN for books, which is why the IF community came up with The Treaty of Babel  as a proposal to come up with

a way of providing unique identifiers for text adventures, past and present, better known as IFIDs: 

https://babel.ifarchive.org/

The only problem here is that when ALAN 3 introduced the IFID in its storyfiles, this wasn't readily picked up by the Babel standard

and tools, which kept generating fall-back IFIDs for these games, as if they had none — which is why on the IFDB their reported IFIDs 

doesn't match their internal one. Although this issue has been now fixed, and the Babel standard and tools updated to reckognize

ALAN 3's IFIDs, old material remains catalogued as it was done back then, at least on the IFBD (which, in any case, uses its own

TADS-IFIDs as the main criteria for identifying adventures, and authors too).

If it wasn't for the above complications, I would have suggested using IFIDs as folder names, but due to the current state of affairs

it's not worth it.

The best solution is to keep the subfoldering strategy down to the minimum required (ALAN version & locale) and rely on a database

for all the rest. This way, you can add or change the handling criteria at any time without having to rename folders, since the ALAN version

or local of a game don't change in time.

Although I'm really fascinated by Information Architecture, I've never been a huge fan of databases and find them very complicate

to design and "map mentally" — all the overlapping categories, and deciding which are the important keys, etc..

E.g. how do you create a unique ID for authors? There are so many IF authors that you actually do bump in different authors sharing

the same name and surname in the IF world. Not to mention that often authors publish some games using a pseudonym (especially

during contests, when they don't want to reveal their true name, e.g. because they are renown IF developers). 

In the IFDB often a single author has multiple personal pages, because different people created them independently, not realizing

there was already one. Other time, different authors with the same name might end up being treated as one, by mistake. Without

a strict criteria for creating a unique identifier for authors these problems can't really be avoided entirely in collaborative databases.

The problem here is that in order to create unique author IDs you'd need to have a lot of accurate info about the person (date and

place of birth, etc.) and use it to create the unique ID — but publicly sharing such private information is beyond what most authors 

are willing to do (rightly so), and even if they did how could we verify the correctness of this data? With games, the required data

is already there: title, subtitle, author, release date — that's more than enough to establish the uniqueness of any game, including

games with the same title (e.g. remakes of "Zork") since it's very unlikely to find two games sharing identical such data.

Tristano