Package Thief vs. Glitter Bomb Trap

More Than A Feeling

Stowaway to Oblivion

During college in the early 1980s I wrote a never published text adventure called Stowaway to Oblivion. It was written in BASIC on the Apple II and had a very simple verb-noun parser. It was a fun little program, but I've always wanted to revisit that code and do something a little more sophisticated á la Zork.

Sadly I no longer have the source for Stowaway, but when I decided to write a new tutorial for CLIPS I came back to the idea of revisiting text adventures. Although the commercial market collapsed several decades ago, I discovered there's still an active community writing text adventures.

In writing the tutorial, I've been happy with how well suited CLIPS has been for this type of application, but as it turns out there's another declarative programming language called Inform 7 that's specifically designed for writing text adventures. It's pretty cool.

DoNots

When I am Earth Overlord, it will be a crime for donut shops to be open but not have any donuts available. That's just wrong.

CLIPS Logo 2018

FuzzyCLIPS 6.31

Updated the FuzzyCLIPS source code to be compatible with CLIPS 6.31 and placed the updates on GitHub.

FuzzyCLIPS 6.24

Updated the FuzzyCLIPS source code to be compatible with CLIPS 6.24 and placed the updates on GitHub.

Star Trek: Discovery

The Good: Clint Howard's cameo is the highlight of season 1.
The Bad: Clint Howard's cameo is the highlight of season 1.
The Ugly: Midichlorians and Jar Jar Binks.

2118 Perhaps?

CLIPS Year In Review: 2017

The API updates for version 6.4 of CLIPS, as well as the release versions of CLIPS JNI 1.0 and CLIPS.NET 1.0, were completed this year. I also found a "good enough" solution for the lack of support for MDI applications in .NET, so CLIPS .NET now includes a CLIPS IDE with support for debugging windows. The makefiles got some attention and I also completed a number of user requests for additional functionality. Finally, the tedious process of updating the Basic, Advanced, and Interfaces Guides were completed allowing the first beta release of CLIPS 6.4 in December.

Plans for 2018 are to complete the release of CLIPS 6.4 so that I can move on to writing CLIPS textbooks. My stretch goal for 2018 will be to include a formal C++ with the 6.4 release.