World Builder

World Builder is a game creation system for point-and-click adventure games.[1] It was released in 1986 by Silicon Beach Software and had already been used for creating Enchanted Scepters in 1984. In 1994, World Builder along with Course Builder, SuperCard, and HyperDA was cited as the reason Appleton was "something of a legend".[2] On August 7, 1995 developer William C. Appleton released World Builder as freeware.

For other uses, see World Builder (disambiguation).
World Builder
Developer(s)Silicon Beach Software
Initial release1986 (1986)
Stable release
1.2 / 1995 (1995)
Operating systemSystem 3
TypeGame Creation System
LicenseFreeware

Functionality

The games World Builder created used different layers of code to manipulate the images the game contained: object code, scene code, and finally world code.[3] The World Template included with the program contained default world code with default failure responses to standard text commands like north, south, up, down, and so on. Other than actions with characters (which were always combat oriented) and clicking on objects to pick them up everything had to set up through code and dialog boxes.

The map is organized in compass directions and up/down as was common in earlier interactive fiction. Characters can be defined to move around independently and interacted with. There is also a special provision for weapons, which have a stochastic impact just as the dice of role-playing games. The game system includes QuickDraw vector graphics, a scripting language and digitized sound. A large number of games were made and released in circulation, many after the application was made freeware in 1995. The software does not support 32 bit addressing and hence games created with it are not compatible with System 7 or later. A ResEdit hack was provided to allow the program (and its games) to run on System 7 to 9 but sounds would not play on Power PC Macs.

Ray Dunakin, author of numerous titles using the game development system, contributed various documentation and supporting files for the World Builder 1.2 release.

Reception

The program was reviewed in 1987 in Dragon #118 by Hartley and Patricia Lesser in "The Role of Computers" column. The reviewers stated that "The variety of worlds, scenes, and characters you can create and motivate seems endless... We are really impressed with World Builder."[4] In a subsequent column, the reviewers gave the program 3½ out of 5 stars.[5]

Games
  • Another Fine Mess
  • A Mess O' Trouble
  • Bug Hunt
  • Enchanted Scepters
  • Little Pythagoras
  • Lost Crystal
  • Midnight Snack
  • Mountain Of Mayhem
  • Psychotic!
  • Quest for T-Rex
  • Radical Castle
  • Ray's Maze
  • Star Trek Game
  • Wishing Well
gollark: All numbers are two's complement because bee you.
gollark: The rest of the instruction consists of variable-width (for fun) target specifiers. The first N target specifiers in an operation are used as destinations and the remaining ones as sources. N varies per opcode. They can be of the form `000DDD` (pop/push from/to stack index DDD), `001EEE` (peek stack index EEE if source, if destination then push onto EEE if it is empty), `010FFFFFFFF` (8-bit immediate value FFFFFFFF; writes are discarded), `011GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG` (16-bit immediate value GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG; writes are also discarded), `100[H 31 times]` (31-bit immediate because bee you), `101IIIIIIIIIIIIIIII` (16 bits of memory location relative to the base memory address register of the stack the operation is conditional on), `110JJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJ` (16 bit memory location relative to the top value on that stack instead), `1111LLLMMM` (memory address equal to base memory address of stack LLL plus top of stack MMM), or `1110NNN` (base memory address register of stack MMM).Opcodes (numbered from 0 in order): MOV (1 source, as many destinations as can be parsed validly; the value is copied to all of them), ADD (1 destination, multiple sources), JMP (1 source), NOT (same as MOV), WR (write to output port; multiple sources, first is port number), RE (read from input port; one source for port number, multiple destinations), SUB, AND, OR, XOR, SHR, SHL (bitwise operations), MUL, ROR, ROL, NOP, MUL2 (multiplication with two outputs).
gollark: osmarksISA™️-2028 is a VLIW stack machine. Specifically, it executes a 384-bit instruction composed of 8 48-bit operations in parallel. There are 8 stacks, for safety. Each stack also has an associated base memory address register, which is used in some "addressing modes". Each stack holds 64-bit integers; popping/peeking an empty stack simply returns 0, and the stacks can hold at most 32 items. Exceeding a stack's capacity is runtime undefined behaviour. The operation encoding is: `AABBBCCCCCCCCC`:A = 2-bit conditional operation mode - 0 is "run unconditionally", 1 is "run if top value on stack is 0", 2 is "run if not 0", 3 is "run if first bit is ~~negative~~ 1".B = 3-bit index for the stack to use for the conditional.C = 9-bit opcode (for extensibility).
gollark: By "really fast", I mean "in a few decaminutes, probably".
gollark: I suppose I could just specify it really fast.

See also

References
  1. Robinson, Ronda (November 20, 2006). "On-demand software company replaces Appleton's fun 'n' games". Knox Business Journal. Archived from the original on August 12, 2007. Retrieved 2008-11-04.
  2. Kantrowitz, Barbara; Ramo, Joshua Cooper (Aug 28, 1994). "Garage-Band Programmers". Newsweek. Retrieved 2017-09-12.
  3. World Builder. Silicon Beach Software. 1986. pp. 83–85.
  4. Lesser, Hartley; Lesser, Patricia (February 1987). "The Role of Computers". Dragon (118): 92–98.
  5. Lesser, Hartley; Lesser, Patricia (October 1987). "The Role of Computers". Dragon (126): 82–88.
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