The Starlight Lines Employee Forum RPG | Hacker News Reader

The Starlight Lines Employee Forum RPG

kotaku.com

208 pointsdnetesn56 comments

Hey, folks. I'm Yoz Grahame, the chap in the article who coded and (very badly) ran the forum. Many thanks to Lewis for writing such a great piece, and to dnetesn for posting it here!

If you're interested in learning more about Starship Titanic and the Employee Forum, I recommend this MetaFilter post: http://www.metafilter.com/98848/The-Post-That-Cannot-Possibl...

Rhaomi put together an amazing collection of links, including a guide to getting and running the game today. I also have a big mess of a comment halfway down the thread with some extra info and stories.

My one main addendum to Lewis's piece: I was far from the only person behind the ST sites. The content was written by Michael Bywater, Neil Richards, and Alison Humphrey. Design & development by Alison Humphrey, Cynthia Miall, Claudio Calvelli and (whenever I got in before lunchtime) me.

Hey, yoz! Thanks for the shout-out. That is probably my favorite post of mine on the site (out of 100+ and counting). So wonderfully serendipitous and fun. Everything about that game is a joy.

I was actually looking back into some of the Starlight Lines forum stuff a few months ago when I discovered with dismay that the original URL (starlightlines.com) was down. I was thrilled to figure out you'd managed to resurrect it! (Did you ever see that email I sent you back in September?)

Anyway, the story of that hidden community is so great, I did my level best alerting anyplace that had originally picked up the story for a correction on the new URL so people could know it was still around. Apart from the fine folks at H2G2:

http://h2g2.com/feedback/A388334/conversation/view/F47997/T8...

...I didn't get much success -- including no response from Kotaku UK when I mailed them offering help for their pseudonymous writer on H2G2 who had been asking for leads on the apparently dead forum:

http://h2g2.com/entry/A452125/conversation/view/F55683/T8309...

It's good to see he ended up doing something with the story after all -- though it would be nice if he'd hat-tipped the MeFi thread where he apparently lifted that "sentient tomatoes" quote from verbatim (unless of course that's just a favorite turn-of-phrase of yours). Lately, MeFi needs all the Google juice it can get.

Cheers, and thanks for all the great stories!

> "it worked fantastically – so fantastically that some people really did send the emails back, reassuring us that they hadn't looked at the site."

I was one of those people! In fact, my email archive still has my response, where I attached the message to the reply, assuring that I'd not read it. I thought I was being so smart!

Sadly, the original emails from "Ford" were lost from my archives somewhere along the lines.

I suspect I got >< close to the forums too. The site is all very familiar to the memory, but I either didn't dig quite deep enough, or found it but didn't realise it was postable rather than a read-only forum with more play marketing.

Still, it's truly fantastic that it's been kept alive so long, and I'm sure should a day ever come that you don't wish to (or unable to) continue hosting it, that there are a legion of fans who would happily take over!

TDV seemed to be a magnet for oddball online communities.

One day, irritated with all the abject nonsense, requests for him to do their English homework, and speculation about the number 42, that was posted to his main forum, Douglas requested to add a "Half Witted Crap" forum. I promptly set that up and, rather than being offended by it, the community took to it with relish. I believe it also developed its own rich subculture but not being as brave as Yoz, I never dared look long enough at it to work out what was going on there.

[edit: found link to original request for new forum: http://www.douglasadams.com/cgi-bin/mboard/info/thread.cgi?4... ]

I administer a small vBulletin forum that I inherited from a friend who inherited it from... well, whatever, this thing's been around for over a decade now.

A few years ago we discovered that we had parasites! Apparently, that version of vBulletin had some sort of secondary built-in way for users to register - totally bypassing the moderation tools I used - and a whole secondary forum which these vermin could use! It didn't show up on the main boards, and was only discovered by accident.

Apparently they'd hitched a ride on our forum to start discussing some pokemon-like game.

We ended up flushing them all out. In hindsight, I really regret this. It wasn't anything as neat as the Starlight Lines forum, but it had only been going for about a year. On the one hand, I probably should have let them continue. On the other hand, I would have to be the benevolent admin of a bunch of people that weren't a part of my community, who were using a server I was personally paying for, and posting god-knows-what. Considering I'd already had to ban several regular users for posting awful things, I didn't want to double my workload.

edit: did a little research; the feature they used was "Social Groups", and they still had to sign up normally, via the moderation tools. I guess they had just signed up far enough in the past that I either had moderation disabled, or I had forgotten about them.

Hilarious! I have a forum that's been around for a similar amount of time and at the beginning it was on vBulletin. At least in the old days it was possible to have hidden forums that didn't show up on the main index, but would show if you went to a specific URL/forum id. Those became little secret forums that the users went to talk shit about other users.

It was hilarious and I'd forgotten about that.

Nowadays there might be twenty or thirty of us left. It's pretty slow but it's a nice little community.

I was about to ask whether you and I were on the same forum, but then I realized that there's maybe five people who even bother signing into mine once a week these days :)

Oh, cool. (The only time I ever met Douglas Adams, I was in London and dropped in on TDV, where a friend of mine was working as a sysadmin -- this was around summer 1997 -- and I got the tour, which included the man himself, who just happened to be in.) IIRC the novelization was going to be written by Robert Sheckley (who was also there, one of the great SF satirists of the 1950s to 1970s, up there with Harry Harrison in his early period):

http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/sheckley_robert

TDV had enormous energy back in mid-1997, but as I understand it everything fell apart very rapidly after Douglas died; he was the main driver behind the whole project, so rather than being an independent games house -- which it had the potential to become -- it died with its founder. (There's a lesson in here for startups, I think: try not to depend exclusively on a single creative vision?)

The company imploded before Douglas died. The dotcom collapse was the final nail. Also Douglas being far more wrapped up in trying to get the film made probably didn't help. He had moved to America and was barely involved with TDV after the game.

I was in charge of douglasadams.com and was a coder on h2g2.com. I left the company a year or so before h2g2 was sold to the BBC and the ill fated Hitchhikers game moved to its own company.

What Shim said. Trust the Shim.

Charles, what Shim & Yoz said… …Be aware that Robert Sheckley did in fact deliver a couple of drafts of the novel. This I know 'cos the second draft is sitting in front of me right now :) And had ST gone along that SF satire route, that might have been appropriate. As it was, it ended up in the 'fiendish family entertainment' space, for which Terry's lighter (frothier, if you like) style was more suited.

>try not to depend exclusively on a single creative vision?

I guess if you have an unmatched creative genius like Douglas Adams in your team, that might be the only real option. Especially since a lot of creative geniuses seem to have problems cooperating with other creative geniuses (at least in my experience).

But I generally agree. Just look at Apple.

We weren't: Douglas was a seriously important catalyst for the company, but so much of the work we did (some of which carries on now) was the result of the coming together of a fabulously talented and deeply eccentric team of people who complemented, contradicted and inspired each other. We had some bad luck along the way (and created a deal of it ourselves) but the final asteroid was the fact that we were weeks away from a major investment round with an NY investment bank when the dotcom market imploded - to oversimplify a very long story, they then walked away and landed us with the bill for their lawyers and their gold-plated private jets. What goes arounds, comes around: they went down spectacularly in 2008, to general rejoicing.

+100

It was great having Douglas around for ideas and contributions: he did many things for Starship Titanic beyond the core ideas, such as designing puzzles and even composing bits of the score. However, as anyone who ever worked with him knew, relying on Douglas to deliver serious amounts of creative work on a schedule was A Bad Idea. (I ended up writing the introduction page for his own site: http://www.douglasadams.com/introduction.html )

But TDV was made up of some of the most interesting, creative, and downright fun people I've ever worked with. It was a bumpy ride through the first dotcom bubble, but such a fantastic thing to be a part of.

It must be scary having a company so dependent on one creative mind. But how would Apple look today if they tried not to depend on Jobs so much? My guess- much smaller, much less significant.

Apple seem to be doing just fine without Jobs:

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/01/27Apple-Reports-Reco...

Now it is, but look back at Apple's share prices in 2000 and what Apple was when Steve Jobs came in. It was a struggling company trying to figure out whom to please, their offering of computers is what HP is now: a multitude of options that does could do anything for everyone.

Steve Jobs' personality and drive created Apple and then saved it by having the executive power to focus the brand away from the various iterations of computers to get to one idea: Beautiful products that people want.

Apple have their golden goose now, they just have to flog it. Like Microsoft did. Maybe they will continue to make new breakthroughs with the massive cash reserves they had, but it's hard to imagine they could top what they've already done.

I think he meant had he not returned after leaving apple the first time.

I am not sure why this game was labelled a secret. I remember it coming out! I also remember it being praised for the AI but don't recall any of the reviews saying why it was so good.

I suspect we'll soon have an article about the secret Lucasarts game called Grim Fandango....

Douglas Adams wrote some interesting books (I fondly remember the 5 book series of Hitchhiker's Guide and listened to the radio show from my dad's cassettes) and thought Dirk Gently's first book was funny but lost interest in the second. I was surprised that this game was labelled as Douglas Adam's creation though - did he write any code? :-)

The actual game the article talks about is so secret that even when presented with a detailed explanation of how it works, you managed to miss it.

Haha valid point I did skim read the article thanks to the abundantly rubbish Internet connection I am stuck with where half of the images never load.

I deserve the stick I'll get for making that comment. I'll reread the article; thanks.

The forum was a big surprise, glad to see small communities like that soldier on.

I think we had the same reaction to the clickbait headline though. I thought "No, it's no secret, it was widely known about when it came out and as I recall, it didn't get good reviews"

As a side note, Grim Fandango was just re-released as a 'remastered' version.

I loved this game when I was a kid. Looks like there is a browser version now!

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Game - 30th Anniversary Edition

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN2...

The original wasn't, this is/was. The original was brilliant - remember I got it as part of a jewel set that came with Spaceship Warlock, Ultima V and VI, and... I can't remember what else.

This was way before my time, but I was still aware of it as an Adams' fan

I remember playing this game when I was younger, and being impressed by the interactivity of the AI. Though honestly, I mostly just swore at them creatively.

I have to wonder, though, if the game did actually have especially good AI, or if I just wasn't familiar with text-based adventure games enough to recognize Starship Titanic as essentially being one.

Here's how the AI worked (second-hand, because although I was semi-involved with the game, I wasn't on the dev team).

The original natural language parser was Velocitext, an engine we licensed from Virtus. I say "original" because our devs - mainly the super-smart Jason Williams - put a ton of tweaks and other new code into it, and Douglas ended up naming the new system "Spookitalk" (because it was spookily good).

Here's how to make spookily good AI:

1. When ST came out (late 90s), everyone had basement-low expectations of natural language parsers. These days things are somewhat better with Siri and Wolfram and the like, but back then the best you had - especially in games - were the Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls adventure systems. It turns out that all you need to blow people away is something that's slightly better than that; people expect computers to be useless at this stuff, so when they can occasionally come out with something smart, the impression is huge.

2. Jason and our test lead (Francine) put HUGE amounts of time in putting people in front of the game, recording text entered and the responses, then tweaking, iterating, etc. The AI's job was to parse text, add a little context and then return one of the several thousand pre-recorded responses. By the time the game came out, Jason had it handling the vast majority of things that people were actually likely to type.

But again, the secret: AI doesn't have to be amazing. It just has to be better than you expect at doing the single thing it's meant to do. (See also: Valve's relatively simple soldier AI in the original Half-Life, which was amazing at the time)

Nearly: We worked with one particular coder from Virtus, who was a (very good) NL person, who worked with us to implement the original engine that we and she designed (I've still got my original design docs - at least the ones that weren't written on Groucho Club table cloths…). What made Spookitalk (itself about the fourth title it had) so effective was that we combined the outlook of engineers (who always try to disambiguate) and writers (who play with the ambiguity and 'noise' of natural language) to create an engine that was explicitly focussed on delivering the illusion of intelligence by whatever means - a large proportion of the later work was focussed on just that - handling and interpreting the contextual and colloquial 'noise' around a conversation and using it to deliver appropriately smartarse responses. In that regard, Spookitalk was the spiritual successor to ELIZA.

Thanks for the correction, Richard!

I remember reading somewhere, they tried to make the "AI" but in the end just relied on having a ton of canned responses to questions.

According to wikipedia: The engine incorporates over 10,000 different phrases, pre-recorded by a group of professional voice actors. The recorded phrases would take over 14 hours to play back-to-back.

I have the hint book. One of few games that made it way to the mac in the 90s. Now sadly unplayable.

Not so. The AI was always there. We originally intended to use Text-to-Speech for output but rapidly found that TTS couldn't deliver the vocal nuances and timing required for the experience we wanted to deliver - this after all was a game where humour and quality of writing were crucial - hence the move to pre-recorded chunks. One of the heroic and oft-unsung latter-day development efforts on the game was the design of the pre-recorded chunks for assembly on the fly at play time and the mechanism by which they were assembled and delivered.

Interesting! Thanks.

I relate to the dilemma. When I was playing Half Life as a kid, I remember being blown away by the "smart enemy AI."

These days I find it odd when enemy AI does NOT react in a dynamic, networked way. Interesting how my expectation has changed over the years. I wonder if the same applies for video game graphics, too?

Depends on the graphics. Sprite-based games are still perfectly playable; Super Mario World is still gorgeous 25 years after its release.

Meanwhile, polygon-based games show their age really, really obviously. You can see the difference between Madden 2005[1] and Madden 2015[2]. I wonder what Madden 2025 is going to look like. Hilariously, people note that Madden 2005 is probably one of the best in terms of gameplay. I don't think it was until 2013 that they actually tried innovating, and the innovations weren't very good.

[1]http://www.vgu.tv/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Madden-05.jpg

[2]http://oyster.ignimgs.com/mediawiki/apis.ign.com/madden-15/9...

I'll go even farther and argue that the beauty and timelessness of good graphics depends on something else, different from whether they are bitmap-based or 3D or whatever.

Like you say, there are really beautiful sprite-based games; but also the polygon-based graphics of Another World are pretty timeless, and I wouldn't trade them for anything else. On the other hand, I agree the graphics of games such as the original Alone in the Dark haven't aged well at all. I can't explain exactly why I feel different about those two games, but I do. Maybe because the graphics from Another World are highly evocative, and its backgrounds sometimes remind me of something out of a Moebius illustration, while Alone in the Dark's are more tied to technological limitations of its time rather than to artistic decisions.

I feel like the polygon graphics in Another World (or Out Of This World) haven't aged nearly as well, much like Star Fox and Super Mario 64 haven't aged nearly as well as Super Mario World and Chrono Trigger. With Star Fox, Super Mario 64, and Another World, you have to look at them through a lens of "well, for the time..."; they were astonishing at the time, but now they look dated. On the other hand, new sprite-based games are still being made and sold today, as well as romhacks for console-based games.

I don't think this is my nostalgia filter talking; there really was a certain peak at the height of the sprite-based era.

(That said, Out of this World is also amazing for being the work of one person.)

>Interesting how my expectation has changed over the years. I wonder if the same applies for video game graphics, too?

How can you wonder? Isn't it obvious?

Graphics that would leave us impressed in 1985 or 1995 or 2000 are considered nothing to write home about a few years later...

While this is true, I find the distinction between graphical fidelity and art style to be important in these matters.

While the graphics of Super Metroid might not be anything spectacular, the pixel art is phenomenal, and replaying it recently I gained a whole new appreciation for how future-proof the art direction in that game is. I think there are many more examples of this out there, too. For instance, people often bemoan early 3d games (Nintendo 64 games especially) for aging horribly. On the whole, that is true. But there are certainly exceptions, such as Majora's Mask, where (again) the art direction saved the game's graphics from the awkward low-polygon limitations of the system.

Each mode has a time when it gets "good enough," and everything on top of that is gravy.

IMHO, for 2D, that was achieved with the NES generation. And for 3D, with the GameCube generation. (My son fired up Metroid Prime yesterday on the Wii, and it took me a while to realize it was a GC game, not a Wii game.)

But, yeah, Super Metroid is amazing. I only played it recently (~6 years ago), never the original, and I still enjoyed it thoroughly.

In this particular case note that the Wii hardware is, to a large degree, a straight repackaging of the GCN hardware with a bit more RAM and a higher clock speed. That the Wii is not an extreme graphical advance over its predecessor is to be expected. :)

I do agree with you in general, though. Which isn't to say that graphical advances aren't still perceptible (compare SNES-era sprites to any of the positively gorgeous sprites from Odin Sphere or Rayman Legends), but at some point you cross a threshold where graphics cease being cringe-worthy and start being merely dated. FFVII is a cringe-worthy example, whereas The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion remains breathtaking to behold (as long as you don't look anyone in the face, that is).

The sub-pixel movement engine in super metroid is fantastic too. It's what makes the art in that game really sing IMO.

Also they got a bit of help from kubrick ;)

Oh, sorry I wasn't precise- yes, absolutely!

I'm particularly curious about the nature of that 'expectation evolution', and how exactly that works- and how, for example, people not exposed to the earlier work might interact with it.

I'm reminded of an interesting story of a father walking his son through all of video game history: https://medium.com/message/playing-with-my-son-e5226ff0a7c3

I remember my father saying FIFA 1996 graphics "looks like live TV".

The book may be out of print but it's available for Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Douglas-Adamss-Starship-Titanic-Terry-...

Some day, I'll come back to Hacker News with that same longing...

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

Will we though? HN is for commenting on articles, which in several years will have their links broken. We don't develop characters, carry on stories or create a memes. Is a community based around commenting on things as durable as one that has to create their own content?

> create a memes

"Did you win the Putnam?"

> We don't develop characters

Look again. :)

A different community certainly, but I've shared many emotions on Hacker News, participated in excellent exchanges of ideas, arguments and discovery. A different flavor, but one with it's own sense of belonging.

We attempted to tone down the baity title just a little, but if anyone has a better suggestion, we'll change it again.

the new title is actually incorrect, the "secret" RPG is not the released-to-the-public game but actually "[The] Starlight Lines employee forum" if one is going to be literal about it. I'd personally just keep the article's title.

Thanks for the correction. I've made that the title, but if anyone has a better suggestion we can change it again.

(The reason for not using the original is that we don't want clickbait tropes like "The Secret Celebrity Foo That Bars Have Been Bazzing For A Bazillion Years". A good HN title is accurate and neutral.)

So its not really secret anymore is it?

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