I would recommend using something like TADS or Inform to get an idea of how to structure your game, if youc an write a small game with a few objects, puzzles and rooms in TADS/Inform then this will provide alot of insight into how to construct your own text adventure... its a long long time since I used Inform, but I believe there is a huge document that comes with it explainin ghow the parser works, thats got to be useful...

- dach

wow.. thanks for your input =)

here''s how my linked lists work..

I have a text file that uses sort-of html-style tags to define certain parts of data. (replaced the ''['' and '']'' with corresponding less-than/greater-than signs =) such as,

[room]
start here ; player''s starting position
exitn = 1 ; north exit
exits = 1 ; south exit
..
[intro]
room introduction...
(only ONE time each game.. then deleted from Heap)
[/intro]

[desc]
room description...
[/desc]
[/room]

if the loader finds [room] it calls the room loader. if it finds [verbs] it calls the verb loader, etc.

and then there is... the linked list. i have a list of pointers storing the description, because the strings vary in size. the introduction is deleted from Heap once you enter that area for the first time. now that presents the problem of saved games.. how am I going to know whether to delete the intros if the player loads a game and has already visited that area??

and not to mention, defining arrays for strings in data seg i can only have 64k!! i tried declaring a struct (record) of string and i couldn''t compile with more than 200 rooms.. so this is not going to work. right now the rooms aren''t linked but they will be shortly (working on that right now)

ack.. so many ideas in my head i can''t code.. i have a headache now thanks again for your input! I''m going to read over it a few more times! cheers,

-shadow

I would suggest using Delphi. I believe you can compile your existing code as a console app and that gets you into 32 bit addressing and gets rid of that problem. It is worth a try at least since you already have Delphi. It would think with a console app you wouldn''t have to change anything about your program.

I just installed Delphi 4. thanks for all your time and advice! cheers,

-AoDh (dos_programmer)