Dungeonfs: A FUSE filesystem and dungeon crawling adventure game engine

[johnfn]

When I was back in elementary school, a friend thought up this brilliant idea that we called "foldermazes", which were basically choose your own adventure games, but the way you chose your adventure was by selecting which folder to go down. I was and still am fascinated by just how brilliant of an idea it was!

Of course there were problems. One that I recall was that I didn't want to have to maintain k^n separate branches of story, so I'd prune off incorrect branches quickly by having your character die or something. :)

We hit the maximum depth for folders very quickly, so I came up with the idea of having a routing table at the base, which was just a single folder with folders labeled 1-10000 inside it. The idea was that you'd get to maximum depth, and then get a number to go into the routing table and continue the adventure. The hope was that there were so many folders within the routing table that it'd be impossible to guess a correct path by chance. (And of course, all the invalid folders had a message like "stop trying to cheat, you cheater! YOUR CHARACTER DIES INSTANTLY!" Remember... 5th grade. :))

I remember working frantically on a "foldermaze" at home for hours, then attempting to put it on a floppy disk. Turns out that is not the sort of operation Windows 95 was optimized for at all - it took hours. (The maze had tens of thousands of folders, most inside the routing table.) Then after a certain point it just failed with "disk full". This really stumped me as a 5th grader. How could the disk be full? Inspecting the properties of my foldermaze showed that it took up 0MB! Far less than the 1.44MB offered by the floppy...

Eventually I pieced together that folders must take up some marginal amount of space more than 0. The property inspector was lying to me! That was very surprising as a kid.

Anyways, this seems like what we did, but way more cool. :)

[jstanley]

> One that I recall was that I didn't want to have to maintain k^n separate branches of story, so I'd prune off incorrect branches quickly

You could always merge storylines later on by symlinking them to the same place!

(Maybe not on Windows).

[chapium]

As silly as this idea sounds you could use this concept to create a commandline tutorial. The folders can contain clues.

[Jemaclus]

I'm building a MUD in Go right now, so this is pretty timely. Really creative take on the genre!

[peckrob]

I was literally JUST thinking about doing this today! Although I was thinking I would only do the actual core (connection handling, database, etc) in Go, and do much of the actual game programming in Lua so that players could extend the game.

[Diederich]

Cool! What kind of MUD, if you don't me asking?

[Daviey]

Reminds me of a cross between Zork Shell (not zsh): https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.folklore.compute...

And a game called "Virus!" on the Amiga in the early 1990's, which I haven't been able to track down.

[LeoPanthera]

Here is Virus for the Amiga. https://david.gloveraoki.net/f/Virus.adf.gz

But it bears little resemblance to this game, so I wonder if you are thinking of something else.

PS. I self-hosted this file, but what's the go-to service for flinging arbitrary files across the internet these days?

[imode]

this is so awesome!

you could turn this into a MUD by just letting people in via SSH. if you supported auto-reloading your YAML files during play (or just keeping track of loaded files), you could support online creation!

I'm fascinated.

[stuaxo]

I love the idea of soundfx by aplay, this would be such a layering violation in any other fs, its delicious.

[LeonB]

I made a folder based hangman game back in 2012. http://secretgeek.net/folderGame

[monk_e_boy]

What twisted mind thought of this?!

[Zancarius]

If you want twisted, I can't help but think of Doom as a Process Management Tool (2001) [1].

[1] https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html

[KC8ZKF]

Has anybody made adventure in git?

[kdazzle]

This is awesome - the file/folder metaphor for data has always been pretty boring

[ksherlock]

dunnet (emacs) exposed the world via a filesystem, too.

[nabla9]

    find . -name "sword"

[Tepix]

By the time the command is done the hero died of thirst.

[xg15]

So what happens if I run grep -R?

[cjhanks]

You die, instantly.

[appden]

Pure genius.

[fiatjaf]

Pure genius.