I think there is some community around branching browser text stories like (mostly) Twine games that have their own database somewhere?
And then there is always some overlap and discussions around what games to allow where, with each community gatekeeping to some degree what games are allowed in their database or not.
So, for example, I never heard about VNDB and never really crossed paths with VN players online, even if I have been around communities for IF and gamebooks since last century and the similarities are obvious.
>similar niche genres of games have managed to mostly ignore each other
That's only because they are only "similar" on the surface. It feels like saying "football, volleyball and basketball are similar" just because they are all team games played with a ball.
thank you for sharing this! I never heard the two website you mentioned while being very familiar with vndb. I guess there will be always another corner of the internet that you don't even know existed.
If you are curious, vndb has a guideline you can see about what can be added here:
https://vndb.org/d2
I think IF games tend to be more puzzle games with some story segments. Gamebooks are much closer, but still often have proto-RPG mechanics. (I remember tracking inventory and HP for the ones I played/read through). VNs are much closer to pure story, with some tracking of earlier decision flags for callbacks later in the story.
Some VNs have no real choices and could hardly be called games. Others are deeply branched.
By the 2010s many JRPGs such as the Hyperdimension Neptunia series and Danganronpa pretty much stole all the visual elements of visual novels and mashed them up with gameplay from other genres.
By now the term "visual novel" got re-imported back into Japan so even Japanese creators have started using it for what they otherwise call "novel games" and VN-like "adventure games".
This assumes that we can get a locked down, secure, stable bedrock system and sandbox that basically never changes except for tiny security updates that can be carefully inspected by many independent parties.
Which sounds great, but the way things work now tend to be the exact opposite of that, so there will be no trustable platform to run the untrusted code in. If the sandbox, or the operating system the sandbox runs in, will get breaking changes and force everyone to always be on a recent release (or worse, track main branch) then that will still be a huge supply chain risk in itself.
The secure boot "shim" is a project like this. Perhaps we need more core projects that can be simple and small enough to reach a "finished" state where they are unlikely to need future upgrades for any reason. Formal verification could help with this ... maybe.
> This assumes that we can get a locked down, secure, stable bedrock system and sandbox that basically never changes except for tiny security updates that can be carefully inspected by many independent parties.
For the most part you can. Just version pin slightly-stale versions of dependencies, after ensuring there are no known exploits for that version. Avoid the latest updates whenever possible. And keep aware of security updates, and affected versions.
Don't just update every time the dependency project updates. Update specifically for security issues, new features, and specific performance benefits. And even then avoid the latest version when possible.
Sure, and that is basically what sane people do now, but that only works until something needs a security patch that was not provided for the old version, and changing one dependency is likely to cascade so now I am open to supply chain attacks in many dependencies again (even if briefly).
To really run code without trust would need something more like a microkernel that is the only thing in my system I have to trust, and everything running on top of that is forced to behave and isolated from everything else. Ideally a kernel so small and popular and rarely modified that it can be well tested and trusted.
Virtual machines are that - tiny surfaces to access the host system (block disk device, ...). Which is why virtual machine escape vulnerabilities are quite rare.
>Which sounds great, but the way things work now tend to be the exact opposite of that, so there will be no trustable platform to run the untrusted code in.
This is the problem with software progressivism. Some things really should just be what they are, you fix bugs and security issues and you don't constantly add features. Instead everyone is trying to make everything have every feature. Constantly fiddling around in the guts of stuff and constantly adding new bugs and security problems.
I think Bootstrappable Builds from source without any binaries, plus distributed code audits would do a better job than locking down already existing binaries.
> This assumes that we can get a locked down, secure, stable bedrock system and sandbox that basically never changes except for tiny security updates that can be carefully inspected by many independent parties.
Not really.
You should limit the attack surface for third-party code.
A linter running in `dir1` should not access anything outside `dir1`.
5+ years ago, perhaps? Almost all the places have closed down now here in Sweden. The bubble popped and now it's a joke and you see repurposed ex-padel buildings around every city. It's been years since I heard anyone talk about it other than to comment on how weird it was that it was so popular for a short time and then disappeared.
Wow, it's really surprising to hear that about Sweden. According to the FIP report there are 14,355 courts built in 2025 worldwide (39 courts per day!).
And Sweden seem to be way ahead than any other country in this padel mania and who knows, many same future is prepared for other countries soon.
But now in Portugal we see a different situation, a lot of clubs are 90% to 100% booked and new padel clubs still appear.
Do you play padel in Sweden? There was a big oversupply of courts, powered by bad expectations and venture capital. Things have scaled down, but I heard it is still very popular. Am I wrong?
WTR did air here in Sweden in the 90s. From a quick search in the news archives, it was on late at night on tv3 in the late 90s and then it ran on that or/and some other cabel channels in the 00s as well (reruns?).
I have not tried the IDE, but I like FreePascal. The compiler is fast and it has great multiplatform and cross-compilation support. In particular for older platforms.
It feels more stable and mature than most other languages. I do not know if there are enough developers keeping it alive, but hopefully it will mostly get bug fixes and ports to new platforms. Better if they do not mess with the language or standard libraries. Those that want a programming language that keeps breaking backwards compatibility every few months have plenty to choose from already.
After installing TTD from GOG I panicked a bit, not seeing any DOSBox or DOS files. For a moment I thought it was files from an old Windows 95 version only, but there was (also) a DOS installer (INSTALL.EXE). I ran that, went through all the usual steps (select Sound Blaster IRQs and so on) and now I can run it from my virtual (git-managed) DOS disk install directory where I install all my DOS games and applications. Next to the original TT that I installed a few months ago from an old CD-ROM. For completeness.
The device that I think popularized that design (citation needed) was the Monome (https://monome.org/) that looks like it is also still around and it has (always had?) some kind of open source license (https://github.com/monome).
What you can do is to instruct it to type out the word, in some language that you don't know at all, making it available in the context while also effectively hidden from you. Simpler than printing it to a file.
I use the assistant daily, often instead of search. The search is good, but the sad fact is searching www has been getting less interesting fast and there simply isn't much of value to find (maybe if they added an option to search in the Wayback Machine? I would pay extra for that!). Adding a LLM on top of search results and to fire off multiple searches makes it possible to sometimes squeeze a little bit of actually useful information out of the cesspool that is modern web.
Without the Assistant I would probably go back down to the lowest kagi tier.
Interactive fiction has https://ifdb.org/.
Gamebooks ("CYOA" to outsiders) have https://gamebooks.org/.
I think there is some community around branching browser text stories like (mostly) Twine games that have their own database somewhere?
And then there is always some overlap and discussions around what games to allow where, with each community gatekeeping to some degree what games are allowed in their database or not.
So, for example, I never heard about VNDB and never really crossed paths with VN players online, even if I have been around communities for IF and gamebooks since last century and the similarities are obvious.
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