Simply type "explore" (it will start the Java program). There are five main adventures, and if you want to try one of these, type the name of the adventure (cave, mine, castle, haunt, or porkys) when asked. Here is some more info on these games:

Cave - "Enchanted Cave" was the first of our adventure games. The fact that it takes place in a cave, like the original Adventure, was no coincidence. This adventure had lots of rooms, but the capabilities of the Explore Adventure Language were just being developed, so even though I think this one came out pretty well, it's not as rich in features as the later ones.

Mine - "Lost Mine" takes place in an old coal mine in a desert environment, complete with scary skeletons, mining cars, and lots of magic. We started to get a little more descriptive in this one, and we also added features to the adventure language to make things seem a little "smarter."

Castle - "Medieval Castle" was the final in the "trilogy" of our late-nite teenage adventure creativity. This one forced us to add even more features to the language, and I believe it really became "sophisticated" with this one. Castle is perhaps the most colorful of the adventures, but not as mystical somehow as Enchanted Cave. De and I didn't make any more games after this one.

Haunt - "Haunted House" was not an original creation. It is a clone of Radio Shack's Haunted House adventure game that I re-created in the Explore Adventure Language as a test of the language's power. I had to play the original quite a bit to get it right, since I was going on the behavior of the game and not its code.

Porkys - "Porky's" is the only one in which I had no involvement. A friend in Oklahoma at the time took the Explore language and created this one, inspired by the movie of the same name. It was especially cool to play and solve an adventure written by someone else with my own adventure language! Warning, this one has "ADULT CONTENT AND LANGUAGE!"

There is a Python version that is maintained, as well (to run, type "python2 python/explore.py"). There are several command line options for this one as well, mostly for running the program inside another script or program. For example, my web-based version uses these features. It is located here:

http://www.wildlava.com/explore/

When I was 15 or so, my cousin, De, and I were into playing adventure games, like the mother of all text adventure games, "Adventure". We wanted to make our own, so we wrote a simple one, but it was hard-coded and was a pain to create. So we came up with the idea to make a program that could interpret adventure "game files" that were written in a kind of adventure "language". So we both wrote programs in BASIC to do this on TRS-80 computers (wow, 1.77 MHz!), and we wrote adventures in separate text files. We later merged our work into this program, which was dubbed "Explore". By the way, I was really bummed when a guy named Scott Adams (not the Dilbert dude!) came out with a commercial program that used the same concept! Just think of all the money we could have made!

We came up with three adventures that were written in the wee hours of the morning on three separate occasions listening to Steely Dan. It was kind of a mystical inspiration I would say.

De is no longer with us, but these games live on for me as a great memory of our friendship, and I hope that they allow a little piece of him to endure.

Years later, I dug up the old BASIC program and rewrote it in C. A few years after this, I rewrote the whole system in Java as a way to learn the language. And years after that, I rewrote the whole thing in Python and later in Ruby. Currently, only the Python version is being maintained.

• Include adventure name in suspend string (?)

• Re-examine unrecoverable resume cases that currently print a warning. These should never happen unless there is a bug in suspend/resume (or there is an error in the adventure files with "OLD VERSION"). Behavior in Android app has been improved if this (impossible?) case actually happens, but removing this case completely would be preferable.

• Old BASIC Explore did a "You can't do that yet." if you try a custom command that's also a builtin without the required object. New java & python ones fall through to the builtin. Which is more right? Crown example (castle) suggests the new way, oil example perhaps not. Python, Java, and Ruby versions now have a variable called "trs_compat" that controls this.

  • New "fixed object" feature takes care of the oil case to a degree.
    • And new "action denied directive" feature does an even better job.

• If you go to a non-existant room, you get "you can't go that way" - OK?

• Should we break on error in takeAction()? We don't break on error if, e.g., = command is used to do a regular command that may fail. Perhaps we should let all actions get run (or do later actions rely on successful completion of previous ones?).

• If there is a room with name None or nil, it would serve as a destination for walking to a blocked or non-existant room.

• If "/" command tries to send you to a non-existant room, no error message is returned.

• Multiple duplicate globals should work requiring different objects.

• Variables (TITLE, ROOM, etc.) are not case insensitive.

• Commands (in adventure file) have to be upper case.

• If commands typed too fast, they appear before prompt (Linux issue).

• Consider changing public member variables to package private.

• Constants (e.g. in World) should all be at top of class.

• When referencing constants (e.g. those in World), use the class name instead of the object name (e.g. use "World." instead of "world.").

• If there is minimal stuff in adventure file, NullPointerException thrown (may be fixed now).

• Check string passing or referencing for potential issues (e.g. expandItemName returns a reference to a string in the list).

• Some cases exist where a delimeter is expected for proper syntax, and not providing it could cause an exception (e.g. ITEM DESC, SAME ITEM, etc.).

• Is there a limit to the textArea length in explore? ...and do lockups when playing a long time and/or fast typing command have to do with this limit or with deadlocking threads? Also, it gets really slow when this gets too large!

• Can't cut/paste in applet in order to suspend/resume.

• Rework itemcontainer so it doesn't leave holes in list.