Personal Nightmare AGOS code

[AlanCox]

I found this whilst sorting piles of old paperwork and junk. It's some bits of the original AGOS game system code and gives a feel for what it looked like before being fed through the bytecode compiler to the game.

The £ is # but confused by the printer.

The game engine was quite flexible but it's at the bridge between the old and new world. Messages were still kept separately and numbered, along with things like locations and all that was managed by hand but the game engine code was a bit more sophisticated the old Scott Adams one or the Quill-like engine used in the later games (Hulk, Robin of Sherwood etc).

P1-Pn are the procedure local variables, the first of them start as arguments, the rest are locals. It was much more an interpreted language with game leanings than a game coding system and that caused problems because the folks at AI UK doing the game coding part were not programmers so whilst AGOS could do amazing things it ended up very much the wrong tool for the job.

1.jpg (234.23 KiB) Viewed 1881 times

[sanguinehearts]

Hi Alan,

Thanks for sharing this! It's fascinating.

I've come across mentions on different websites about a supposed God/Wizard mode for this game, granting players invincibility and the ability to pass through closed doors. Do you recall anything about that, or could this code perhaps shed some light on it?

[AlanCox]

There was a wizard mode which was a sort of a spoof of the AberMUD one. It was really a debugging mode of course and it was I think mostly in game bytecode. The ability to turn it on is disabled entirely in the released game itself (Mike was quite insistent about that, I don't think he trusted us not to let it out one day) but I don't remember if the variable that turned it on or off and stuff it did is hooked into it survived. It let you do things like teleport to spots or just acquire objects for debug testing bits of the game. With the complexity of all the time related stuff it was otherwise a complete PITA to debug some of the scenes. You'd need to look through the game bytecode for words like GOTO and what it executes and checks.

Elvira has one too of course because it's a modifed Aber5 engine. In fact the entire game (graphics aside) is written in the game through the "wizard mode" built in (and scripted) commands.

[sanguinehearts]

Very interesting, thanks for your response! Do you have plans to archive the AGOS code anywhere?

[AlanCox]

All I have is a few scraps from printouts. In addition the rights are I assume still with whoever ended up owning the remains of Adventuresoft/Horrorsoft/whoever after they went bust.

Only other detail that might be of interest - the game compiler ran on an Amiga.