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Add Colossal Cave Adventure IDs to metadata #46

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dfabulich opened this issue Dec 17, 2024 · 0 comments
Open

Add Colossal Cave Adventure IDs to metadata #46

dfabulich opened this issue Dec 17, 2024 · 0 comments

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@dfabulich
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I reorganized the links on IFDB's Colossal Cave Adventure page today, putting IMO the best links first. This game is a tough problem for IFDB, because it has literally hundreds of variants, some of which are faithful adaptations, and some of which are ports, and some are variants that extend the game, sometimes adding puzzles. The variants are sometimes faithful to the original, and sometimes more flexible.

We now link prominently to https://mipmip.org/advfamily/advfamily.html which catalogs tons of variants and assigns them all IDs.

For example, https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/source/adv350-pdp10.tar.gz is WOOD0350. https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Advent.z5 is NELS0350. IMO the most faithful version for modern players today is https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/advent.z8 ODWY0350. ODWY0350 is a port of Don Knuth’s KNUT0350, which was written in CWEB as a direct port from WOOD0350. O’Dwyer ported KNUT0350 to C99, and then compiled the C99 to Z-code using vbccz.

I think it would be useful for IF Archive to include these ID numbers in its metadata; I’d volunteer to add them. But it’s not totally clear to me how best to do that.

For example, I could just add the ID number to the description of various files, e.g. for https://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/games/zcode/#Advent.z5 it currently says:

Adventure aka Colossal Cave, the original 350 points version ported to Inform by Graham Nelson, based on Dave Baggett’s TADS reconstruction “Colossal Cave Revisited”. Release 9 / Serial number 060321.

I could just add [NELS0350] to that. Or I could say something like [Variant NELS0350]

But I think maybe I’d want to add it to the “Metadata” section, which, in turn, means I’d add it to https://github.com/iftechfoundation/ifarchive-ifmap-py/blob/main/lib/metadata.html

But, is that a good idea? Would a PR for that be welcome?

Another gotcha here is that AFAIK there’s no commonly accepted name for these IDs. Like, IFDB IDs are called “TUIDs”, but these things don’t have a name like that. Above, I called them “variants” but that’s just a word I’ve seen used sometimes. https://mipmip.org/advfamily/advfamily.html calls them “All Known Versions and Ports of Adventure.”

So if I added a “Metadata” feature, I’d need to give it a prefix, like tuid: tuidcomp: or ifwiki:. I’m… not sure what I’d call it. adventureid? colossalcaveadventureid? colossalcaveadventurevariantid? colossalcaveadventureversionid?

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