Titanic: Adventure Out of Time

CyberFlix, 1996, on DreamFactory 4. Two discs, six languages, a demo, and a ship that sinks on a clock.

This section is about the game rather than the engine: what it is, how its story is gated, what makes its one timed mission run, which editions exist, and how a reimplementation of it was checked against the original. For the machinery any of that stands on, see the engine.

• How the game works — the shape of the whole thing: rooms, movies, conversations, the missions
• The mission flow — the story as data: the globals that gate every branch, recovered from the scripts themselves
• The sinking — mission 4 is the only part that plays against a clock, and the clock is on your wrist
• Languages & the chooser — six pressings, six code pages, and a chooser stage this port authored because the original shipped one language per install, and the captions for what the game only lets you hear
• The low-memory game — the shorter songs and quieter ambience the scripts fall back to on a machine short of memory, and how a player asks for them
• Developer mode — the 1996 debug build put back up: one edited line, TI.EXE's own menu bar, and what debugging opens
  • The census — every read of the flag and every modifier probe in the corpus, generated, with what each branch does
• Free roam — the guided tour playmode.mov offers, entered directly, and the six doors that answer one with a knock
• TH mode — the room alone on a wide display, the menu band sliding in when it is wanted, after Tyler Hartman's fullscreen builds
• How we know it's right — what was checked, against what, and what "right" was allowed to mean

The code

taoot/ in the repository. The front page, /play/, /freeroam/, /minigames/ (Buick's blackjack, the fencing bout and the fist fight, played without the ship), /collection/, the caption editor at /captions/ (captions), and the unlisted /speedrun/ workbench, /devmode/ and /bedsit/ (a model of the London flat to walk in, built off the game's frames) — the six editions and the demo, its own tools, and the suites that play the game through to the end.

Being the game the engine was recovered from, it also carries most of the project's evidence:

taoot/tests/auto/	nearly all the behavioural coverage there is (the inventory)
taoot/tests/playthrough/	the game played from boot to credits in one session, 27 segments (the route)
taoot/tests/browser/	the same route through a real page, diffed against the same trace
taoot/tests/speedrun/	that route written as a sheet and driven against the clock (the speedrun); contributed sheets are in taoot/speedrun/sheets/
taoot/tools/	the TI.EXE mining tools, the flow map, the deck-map extractor, the language chooser and the intro film (the tools)

The engine underneath is game-agnostic and lives in engine/ — where the line falls, and why, is the architecture map.

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