Wow! This is great, really amusing. Could spend hours on this :D
Good job ;)

Haha! I used to play this on my C64!

Maybe we should all just remeber this...

(quietly)

breath in.....

breath out .....

(pause)

breath in.....

breathe out...

(rapdily) AND THEN GO

AGRRELJRELJRLEJRL ERLJLJFJLKJEJL !!!!!

(but, as long as you know where your towel is, - even if it's at the bottom of a trash heap on Alondis four, been trans formed into offal, and
mulled over by the "cousel of the sighted"
- v. odd, considering that the inhabitants
of alondis four are SIGHT-LESS (no eyes = SIGHTLESS)

peace, frood.

peace.

but: not a staic peace liek "death"

but, a dynamic one
like
art, music, hitory, wonder'wander, and etc

or more properly

music, art, conversation (MAC),
and wonder/wander, and & etc

-- frank.

I remember when this was done with AIM bots a few years back: http://www.waxy.org/archive/2004/03/21/infocomb.shtml - a great game :)

I need an analgesic, and have you seen my sunglasses?

Wow this is great. I hope it stays online for a while! This is ingenious, because it can really be used with all the text adventure games out there...

Would there be a way to save/load your progress? Maybe the program could spit out a code when you give it a !save command?

Keep it up!

Sure. Type 'save' to save your progress, and 'restore' to reload the previous save.

It wasn't working this morning due to an oversight on my part, but it's working fine now.

What client is that you're using?

how do I do this? how how? how?

If the client question was directed to me -- Google Talk.

For anyone wanting to give it a try, just connect to PrakBot@jabber.org in your favourite Jabber (XMPP) client (both GTalk and iChat will talk it).
The commands you need to know are

!startgame - starts a game
!stopgame - stops a game
!status - prints out your progress

As mentioned above, 'save' and 'restore' can be used to save your progress.

Oh, and the client shown in the pic above is Adium (http://adiumx.com/ ), a good little multi-protocol client for OSX.

Ooh, save and restore do work! I take it your backend saves sessions per user-id... thanks so much! :)

Here's a guy who knows where his towel is!

BTW - Have you got the Bureaucracy game?

Brilliant icon! Nifty idea too.

Ohhhh la la!! I want to try this with Wishbringer. Do you has open source?

Hey.

You do realize a HELL of a lot of IF writers would like this kind of thing? Just so you know.

I've been having an issue with Zork. I can't seem to pick up the sword in the house. I just get no response and it eventually timesout. I'm using GTalk and have used it via IE and Firefox.

Looks like there's a bug in the ZMachine interpreter I'm using.

I've put a short-term fix in place that should let you progress beyond that point, but the long-term fix will be to move to a more up to date interpreter (such as ZMPP).

Ha!
I have been bouncing this around in my head for a few months with the same motivation as a project to brush up on my XMPP / python skills.

Nice work.

The bot appears to be down. It's not answering any requests :( I was partway into a game of phobos, and would like to continue.

If this is intentional, thank you muchly for running a cool service, even if it died an early death.

It came back up later that day. Who knows what the problem was. I can continue my mild addiction now, yay!

Aw shucks. Is this down? I was looking forward to playing.

Man, I can't live without this. Please bring it back.

I'm half way through Zork I. So just Zork II, III, Hitch Hikers and Phobos to go. I know this is something you've put up from the goodness of you're heart. I just wish it stayed up longer.

There's some strange behaviour in the XMPP library I'm using that keeps taking the bot offline.

I'm tracking down the problem and hope to make it more consistently stable soon. In the meantime I'll prod it back to life when necessary.

prod prod :)