Beyond the Tesseract

An abstract text adventure by David Lo

HOW TO PLAY

Connect to the AT&T 3B2 1000-70 and type 'tess'

Scenario:

You have reached the final part of your mission.  You have gained access
to the complex, and all but the last procedure has been performed.  Now
comes a time of waiting, in which you must search for the hidden 12-word
message that will aid you at the final step.  But what choice will you
make when that time comes?

The scenario for the adventure is meant to be vague.  Once the adventure has
been completed, the scenario will hopefully become clear.

Instructions:

This adventure recognizes the standard commands for moving (N,E,S,W),
taking inventory (I), maninpulating objects (GET, DROP, LOOK), and
saving games (SAVE, LOAD), as well as many others.  Use 2-word 'verb noun'
commands, such as 'use stack' or 'get all'.  Only the first four letters
of each word are significant.  The adventure recognizes about 200 words,
so if one word doesn't work, try another.

The game also accepts an argument of -f at run-time for fast start-up.
This skips the title screen, scenario and instructions.  Very useful
for people at lower baud rates.

Notes:

The "stack" is an acroynym for Space Time Activated Continuum Key.
You will find this object very useful.

This adventure is abstract and a bit on the technical side.  Detail
knowledge of the technical background is not necessary, although it will
make the adventure more enjoyable.

There is no carry limit, and no death traps.  The map of the adventure can
be draw on a grid.  All it takes is a little experimenting to put all the
subsets of locations together "logically".

History:

Version    Date        Machine        Language         # Lines

1.0        Jun. 1983   16K TRS-80     Level II BASIC   350
2.0        Sep. 1988   IBM-XT clone   Turbo C 1.5      2500
2.0p       Nov. 1988       "          dlc,msc,qc
                       Sun-3          pcc,gcc

Tesseract Version 2.0 is my first MS-DOS adventure and an exercise in
learning C.  Since this is a direct port of the old BASIC version, it may be
smaller than some other adventures, and some of the coding might not be too
clean.  For the C version, appropriate changes were made to the data
structures, additions and small changes made to some of the puzzles, and the
ending expanded.

The very first adventure that I wrote was in 1982, titled "Hall of the
Mountain King" (find the Crystal of Light).  Tesseract Version 1.0 was the
second of the three TRS-80 BASIC adventures that I wrote in a two month
adventure-frenzy during the summer of 1983.  The first was "Project Triad"
(defuse the bomb on the space station), and the third was "Codename
Intrepid" (deliver a package to another agent).

The first release was version 2.0 in Oct. 1988, in binary form over Usenet.
This release (2.0p) is the portable source version designed to work with
compilers other than Turbo C.  -- Dennis Lo.

References:

The following books and reference works were used at one time or another
as a source of information and/or inspiration:

  The Beauty of Fractals.
  The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought.
  The Fractal Geometry of Nature.
  Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.
  The Heritage Illustrated Dictionary Of the English Language.
  Mathematics: The New Golden Age.
  The New Lexicon Webster's Dictionary, Encyclopedic Edition.
  The Penguin Dictionary of Science, Fifth Edition.
  Roget's International Thesaurus.
  The Science of Fractal Images.
  The VNR Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics.
  The World of M.C. Escher.

SCREENSHOTS