Hatrack II - Hayley Software RRP œ29.95 inclusive
     (Interactive adventure generator for the Amiga)

              Reviewed by The Grue!

It has been a long time coming but at last someone has developed
an adventure creator for the Amiga. Of course there are PD
creators but this is the first commercial one that I know of.
Well, what do you get for your money and how easy is it to use?

What you receive for your money is a rather daunting 100 page
manual, quick reference card and a disk. A quick glance through
the manual will at first have you wondering what you have let
yourself in for! But if you take the time to read it a few times
and follow the tutorial which covers about 20 of the 100 pages,
you'll soon start to believe that anyone can write their own game
using Hatrack. The manual is really well written and for the most
clear with its instructions. Having programming experience is not
necessary but it would help you to get to grips with some of the
trickier elements of creating your own game at a faster rate. The
manual covers almost everything you'd need to know about the
system but because the system is so flexible in some cases it
can't tell you what to do exactly and will offer the general
principle involved and from there you will have to do some work of
your own. After I had typed in the tutorial a lot of the manual
which had seemed beyond me started to make some sort of sense and
my confidence was growing rapidly.

The system will work with the standard 512K Amiga but in my brief
experience with it I would recommend 1MB to get a fuller use of it
and you might find you need 1 Meg to write a game that will run on
a standard Amiga. That is because the generator uses about 22K and
you must allow for any memory your game takes. Hatrack II uses a
windowing system with pull down menus and it is so easy to shift
from the location window to the message window but the best thing
about Hatrack is that as you edit your adventure the changes and
additions are effected immediately. The location window has
various fields, the Summary is the brief description of the
current location where you'd type in something like, IN THE DUSTY
ALCOVE, and then beneath that is the Description, where you can
type in the full or verbose description of the dusty alcove. All
descriptions begin with "You are" automatically with the generator
so you can omit that part of the description.  Below the
description of the current location are all the compass points
including in/out and up/down. If you are editing location 1 in
your game and going NORTH will take you to location 2 then all you
have to do is type "2" next to north. If by going north you would
come across a blocked exit then all you have to do is type "999"
instead of "2" and the game would respond with "That way is
blocked". By what, I hear you ask? Well, it could be a locked door,
that depends on you and your game. So once you have typed in your
description to your first location just click on the next arrow
and you'll be presented with a new window which will be location
2. What could be simpler?!

Now the OBJECT WINDOW. Each object has two descriptions, a formal
and informal one. The formal description is the one the player
will see and the informal one is the word the player will have to
type in to refer to the object in the game. This is where one of
the first nice features of Hatrack appears. The informal name of
the object is automatically added to the vocabulary list for you.
There is also a multiobject field if you wish to include objects
with similar names such as RED KEY and BLUE KEY. Once this has
been entered, click on the message gadget and a small window will
appear allowing you to write your "examine message" for that
particular object without having to go to the message section. The
remaining fields in this screen are for the location, weight, bulk
and carry status of the object, all very simple and straight-
forward.

The WORDS WINDOW is just as simple as the previous two. Just type
in the word and then tell it whether it is a verb, noun etc or
whether it is an object. The generator will automatically number
them for you unless you wish two words or objects to have the same
meaning such as GET and TAKE. Verbs 1 to 21 are predefined and you
can scroll quite rapidly though the words list using the gadgets
at the bottom of the screen.

The MESSAGE SCREEN is very easy. Type in the message you want then
click on the NEXT gadget and the next message screen and number is
displayed ready for your message to be edited. If you wish to edit
a particular message that you previously did but can't remember
what number it was then there is a very helpful FIND facility
where a small window opens up displaying all the current messages
help by the system. Just scroll through to find the one you are
looking for then click on the GOTO gadget and type in the number
and it is instantly displayed on screen ready for editing.

The VARIABLE screen is also nice and easy to edit. The left hand
field is for your variable name then its initial state, its
current state and room for a small description to remind you what
the variable is used for. For instance, a variable name could be
DOOROPEN and the initial state would be ZERO meaning the door is
closed and the current state would be altered if the player opened
the door. The description can be whatever you want such as "Flag
set if door open".

So far everything has been, and is, very easy to follow. All the
various edit windows have good search, find and goto gadgets which
make life a lot easier as your game starts to grow and, don't
forget, as you've been working your way through the various edit
windows you can quit them and return instantly to the game and
see the effects of your hard work (or, rather, easy work). The
hard work comes next with the puzzle windows.

The PUZZLE EDIT window is the most complex of all, in fact it is
probably the only complex edit window. There are 23 puzzles
already defined as default for actions such as DROP, GET,
INVENTORY, MOVING and printing location descriptions. Editing the
puzzles is where a little programming knowledge would be helpful
but it is not essential. The puzzles use a simple formula of:

IF VE=SEARCH AND OB=DOORMAT AND LC=2 THEN
IF UV(KEYFOUND)-0 THEN
ME(57):OC(KEY)=3:UV(KEYFOUND)=1
ELSE
ME(58)
ENDIF
ENDIF

This puzzle translates as, if the player has typed in SEARCH
DOORMAT and is in location 2 then carry on, otherwise skip this
puzzle and move to the next. VE refers to the verb and OB to the
object. If the user variable KEYFOUND is set at zero then the key
has not been found yet so do three things:  1. Print message 57 to
tell the player they've found it. 2. Give the key to the player
(Object carry OC for key is set to three, which means the player
is now carrying the key). 3. Set the user variable KEYFOUND to 1
which means the key has been found and can't be found again. If
the user variable KEYFOUND is set to 1 then the key has already
been found so print message 58 which tells the player there is
nothing under the doormat.

Once all this has been typed in you have to click on the PARSE
gadget. The generator will then attempt to interpret what you have
just typed in. If everything is as it should be then the message
PARSED OK will appear and you can then move on to the next puzzle.
If you have not typed in everything correctly the generator will
give you an error message and the cursor will move to roughly the
place where the problem is in the puzzle. If you have missed out
the end of a bracket or some other symbol then the error message
will tell you exactly where the missing symbol should go and what
symbol the generator is expecting to make the puzzle correct. This
makes the system very user-friendly but what really makes the
puzzle window speed things up is that you can add messages and
variables without having to return to their respective edit
windows. You can also clear a whole puzzle to clipboard or just a
single line from a puzzle. The benefit of this is that you can
clear a line in a puzzle and see instantly how it affects that
particular bit in the game. If it doesn't do what you want then
simply return to the edit window and re-insert that particular line
and try inserting a new line within the puzzle to give you the
desired effect. The system is so flexible and open ended you can
alter, edit and experiment and see the results instantly.

The puzzle edit window also has SEARCH, GOTO and FIND facilities.
The latter is really good, where, suppose you wanted to find a
KEY, it will come up with a list of any puzzle with a KEY in it.
All you have to do then is click in the GOTO gadget and the
desired puzzle will be displayed for you to edit if you wish.

The last window is the GAME OPTIONS. This allows you to say what
type of screen the game will be displayed on, the text colours,
compass file, title bar etc. You can run your game as a workbench
window or choose a custom screen, you can have a hi-res screen or
a lo-res one. Screen choice should be made carefully as a two
colour custom screen is only half as memory hungry as a workbench
one. The difference between hi-res and lo-res is that the text in
lo-res appears about three times the size of the hi-res screen.

The direction strings are also displayed here, allowing you to
change them if you wish. This could be useful if you were on a
ship and you wanted to alter WEST and EAST to PORT and STARBOARD.
The initial and current locations are displayed, the initial is
where the player will start the game from and the current can be
altered to move around the game quickly for the purpose of
testing. You can ever alter the game prompt to whatever you want.
All of these can be changed in seconds and the changes will be
effected as soon as you exit this window. Hatrack also allows you
to display an on-screen compass so the player can move around using
the mouse. A couple of compasses are included on the disk but if
you would like to edit or design your own there is also a MAKE
COMPASS program on the disk. I liked this a lot because you can use
an IFF picture and turn it into a compass. This meant that I could
use the same compass and border as used by Infocom if I so wished.

The PARSER used by Hatrack is very sophisticated, very similar to
Infocom standards and by using the up and down arrow keys the
player can scroll back and forth through their previous commands.
To say that is all there is to Hatrack would be very unjust and
the system is so flexible and open ended, all the predefined
puzzles, messages and macros can be edited and altered in almost
any way possible. You can have up to 998 locations, 499 objects,
399 user variables and 999 words, puzzles and messages so you are
more likely to run out of memory before you run out of anything
else! At first the puzzles seemed to be used rather quickly but
that was just due to my inexperience and as I progressed with
Hatrack my puzzles became much more compact. What I had previously
been taking two or three puzzles to do was now done in just one.

That just about covers the main features in Hatrack. Everything is
in the manual and on the screen and is nicely laid out. It even
has a built in OOPS command, One of the other nice things I liked
about the program was the save routine. This, like most things with
Hatrack, is very flexible, giving the player total freedom over
what they would like to do with it ie save it to the game disk or
a different one or to RAM. The program also contains a MAKEDISK
program to prepare a blank disk ready to save your data to, a
RUNMODULE program and the STANDALONE program which only works one
way and once your data has been run through this cannot be loaded
back into the generator. With the RUNMODULE program you can have
more than one adventure on a disk but I think most people would
edit the startup sequence of the disk to make it auto-boot because
it looks more professional, but it is still a good option to have.

I have very little to gripe about with my use of Hatrack and in my
opinion it is the best adventure generator that I've seen on any
machine. To give you some idea of how good I think it is, I tried
to convert Bob Adam's Amstrad adventure on it. I actually managed
to do this in 2-3 weeks without a great deal of difficulty! It is
great value for money and if you have ever thought of writing your
own adventure this could be just the utility you have been looking
for. Unfortunately my own version of Hatrack developed a bug. I
sent off my disk together with my data disk for Hayley Software to
look at and I would like to thank Tony Heap who actually rang me
up to tell me what had gone wrong and then returned my disks with
the updated version almost immediately. No that is what I call
service! Oh, by the way, Bob's game now runs perfectly and is 
available from Atlas Software. All I have to do is write my own
now. Let's think, REVENGE OF THE KILLER HAMSTERS sounds like a
good title to me ......

Hatrack II is available from Hayley Software,
27 Winnington Rd, Marple, Stockport, SK6 6PD.