that's a good point, actually. the features that differentiate terminactory from.. say, factorio, is the agent telegrams, the lore behind the game (optional, it's a factory game, with a lot to discover story-wise, in-game), and some other QOL features ("blueprint" that let you copy paste sections, with mirroring and rotating, unlockable on the early game; selecting a large area and deleting it, and a few more)
of course, it's not objectively better than any game, but there are a few separating qualities from the average popular factory game xD
> It is made to sit in a split next to your AI agents. They can send you short messages that show up in the game, so you can play while they work.
> Agent messages
> Your AI agents can message you inside the game. A message costs the agent only the words in it, and nothing prints on success. Messages wait while the game is closed.
It's kinda amazing how the ancient "local mail" technology keeps getting reinvented, you know, and reintegrated inside the gameplay? NetHack had its its "mail demon" since... (googles) version 1.0.2, in April 1985 — the creature would spawn in the game, deliver you a scroll of mail, and vanish. And apparently, it's still in use nowadays? "On public servers such as nethack.alt.org, a user may observe other users' games and communicate with them by sending mail."
wow, i didn't know about NetHack, that's pretty damn cool!
and yeah, genuinely insane how we came full-circle lol... on terminactory it uses claude code hooks, with an optional "tfac msg" command (tried to minimize token usage, hence the hook)
but yeah, the netHack thing is pretty cool, guess you learn something new every day? xD
well, that is an INSANE amount of praise, thank you so much! but yes, the ASCII art was inspired by Dwarf Fortress, Cataclysm, and a few other games :D
That was CP437 squeezed into a terminal emulator that ran sixteen or so OpenGL calls per character. I spent a couple months building a shim library to optimise it, before Toady let me fix the game. :p
Real terminal output ought to be faster, but don’t sleep on Kitty.
To me, it could be interesting for ~10 minutes, and I'd then prefer playing a game like Factorio.
of course, it's not objectively better than any game, but there are a few separating qualities from the average popular factory game xD
> Agent messages
> Your AI agents can message you inside the game. A message costs the agent only the words in it, and nothing prints on success. Messages wait while the game is closed.
It's kinda amazing how the ancient "local mail" technology keeps getting reinvented, you know, and reintegrated inside the gameplay? NetHack had its its "mail demon" since... (googles) version 1.0.2, in April 1985 — the creature would spawn in the game, deliver you a scroll of mail, and vanish. And apparently, it's still in use nowadays? "On public servers such as nethack.alt.org, a user may observe other users' games and communicate with them by sending mail."
> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
and yeah, genuinely insane how we came full-circle lol... on terminactory it uses claude code hooks, with an optional "tfac msg" command (tried to minimize token usage, hence the hook)
but yeah, the netHack thing is pretty cool, guess you learn something new every day? xD
That was CP437 squeezed into a terminal emulator that ran sixteen or so OpenGL calls per character. I spent a couple months building a shim library to optimise it, before Toady let me fix the game. :p
Real terminal output ought to be faster, but don’t sleep on Kitty.