AAS (Advanced Authoring System)

Games written in Inform, Glulx, TADS, CAT, HUGO and similar. Pleas for help, puzzles, bug reports etc.

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Gunness
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AAS (Advanced Authoring System)

#1 Post by Gunness » Tue Mar 29, 2016 2:02 pm

I was updating some games and came across AAS again.

IFWiki lists it as an "XML-based authoring system" and then notes that the entire thing was later revealed as an elaborate, April's Fool hoax.
But I'm confused by the "hoax" status, as the wiki goes on to mention that "a language and interpreter had to be created. Because of the short time available, an XML-based design was chosen".

So apart from the fact that the system probably wasn't very advanced after all, and that the people behind it decided to use various bogus names, they did in fact write a system and various games (of, admittedly, questionable merit). Maybe I just interpret "hoax" in a wrong way - I have something akin to vaporware in mind.

Mr Creosote
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Re: AAS (Advanced Authoring System)

#2 Post by Mr Creosote » Wed Mar 30, 2016 7:21 am

I think your final paragraph sums it up nicely. Maybe "joke" would be more appropriate than "hoax".

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Re: AAS (Advanced Authoring System)

#3 Post by Gunness » Wed Mar 30, 2016 9:08 pm

Ok, I'll update the entry then :)

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Garry
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Re: AAS (Advanced Authoring System)

#4 Post by Garry » Sun Dec 24, 2017 12:18 pm

I have recently been playing the AAS games and I think terms like "joke" and "hoax" are quite unfair. It was developed "in secret" by a team of very smart people. The idea was to develop an adventure authoring system in a very short period of time, somewhat like Speed-IF, and make it look like it was a commercial product. Hence all participants used pseudonyms during the development process.

AAS includes an adventure editor and interpreter written in Java. The editor is GUI based and very easy to use. It can run on any computer with a Java runtime engine. Even though it's quite old, I used it on Windows 7 with a fairly recent 64-bit JRE without any trouble whatsoever.

It uses an XML file as the output from the editor and the input to the interpreter, hence it does not need to be compiled. There is a full specification for the file format. As this is a text file, it can also be edited in a text editor.

It also includes a comprehensive 31-page user manual as a PDF document. It used to have its own web site and forum (now defunct).

My point is that it is more complete and better documented than many other adventure authoring tools out there, even commercial ones, and it was all written in just one month! The one thing that I don't like about it is the strong support for RPG elements (combat against a random number generator with hit points and all that rubbish), so many of the games appear to utilise this. If they do, I change the player's hit points to 9999, so that I don't get killed by the monsters.

All the editor and interpreter files and the games can be downloaded from the IF-Archive.

The first game I played was Fabled Caves of R'th-nylch! by Adam Biltcliffe, writing as 'Pat Samuel Vickers'. Unfortunately, this game was incomplete, so I've done a fixed version so that you can complete the game and get a full score. I also discovered that the IF-Archive file for AAS Masters by Stephen Granade, writing as 'David Banner', is corrupted, but this is easily fixed in a text editor. I have done screen grabs for all the games and will update the CASA database in due course.

Anyway, don't discount AAS. Even though the finished adventures are simple, they're still full-fledged adventures and deserve equal billing with all the other adventures on CASA.

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