Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gnosis 4739 days ago
Have you ever heard of games that don't run within web browsers?

That's what I thought this particular game might be.

In fact, there is a slew of standalone, non-browser-based Interactive Fiction game engines like Frotz[1], Zoom[2], and Inform7[3] out there that this particular game might have been written in. And I would have had no problem playing it then.

[1] - http://frotz.sourceforge.net/

[2] - http://www.logicalshift.co.uk/unix/zoom/

[3] - http://inform7.com/
2 comments
vertex-four 4738 days ago
This is not an interactive fiction game. While primarily text-based, it uses rich UIs based around that text, and the input mechanism is not command-based, but instead generally button-based (or in the case of the third and fourth parts of the game, partially arrow-key-based). In addition, the end of the game isn't actually text-based at all.

The developer would have to ship their own custom engine, at which point you have unsandboxed code running under your user account on your computer, instead of code sandboxed in the browser (which is probably the most generally available and secure sandbox for arbitrary code that exists right now). You are quite unlikely to give the game a full code review to make sure it's not making any analytics requests or shipping your data off to the program author, so that is probably worse from a logical security standpoint.

Now, if you're worried about the request to load JQuery from ajax.googleapis.com, you could've pointed out originally that this is a concern for those who worry about their privacy, and most on here would agree with you. I'm not actually sure why the author of this game decided to use the CDNed JQuery, when the rest of their scripts are unoptimized and loaded from their own server.

link
unimpressive 4739 days ago
'Secure' interpreter? Fair enough. I'm afraid that would likely make it harder to get started though. Not to mention that JS probably has support for better graphics assets than a regular text game interpreter.
link
gnosis 4738 days ago
"JS probably has support for better graphics assets than a regular text game interpreter."

This game was billed as a "minimalist text-based game", for which any of the standard Interactive Fiction interpreters would have been more than adequate.

Incidentally, many of these IF interpreters are able to display graphics, and sometimes even sound -- though the usefulness or appropriateness of those features in the context of IF is debatable.

link