Zarf Updates: The Visible Zorker

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2025-01-14 17:30:05

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...Okay, a quick introduction. The left pane is regular old Parchment, the Z-code interpreter, playing Zork 1. You type commands; the game responds.

Just regular old Parchment? Not quite! This is Parchment exposed. The upper right pane shows the stack trace for the current turn. That's all the ZIL functions called, and all the text printed, when executing the most recent command.

And the bottom right pane shows the ZIL source code -- the original text, written by Infocom folks in the 1980s. Click on any function or printed string; it'll show you that code in context.

The "World" tab shows the game world as nested objects. The "State" tab shows ZIL global variables. "Timers" is the table of timers and daemons -- functions called every turn or counting down to a future call.

All of these displays update live, every turn, as you play the game. You can click on any line to see the ZIL source that implements it.