Unlike other works of interactive fiction, the game was also in real time - if you left the keyboard for too long, events continued without you by automatically entering the "WAIT" command with the response "You wait - time passes".
If the main character was sitting in a barrel which was then picked up and thrown through a trapdoor, the player went too. Objects could be placed inside other objects, attached together with rope and damaged or broken. Objects, including the characters in the game, had a calculated size, weight and solidity. The game had an innovative text-based physics system, developed by Veronika Megler. The disk-based versions of the game used pre-rendered, higher-quality images. The slow CPU speed meant that it would take up to several seconds for each scene to draw. On the tape version, to save space, each image was stored in a compressed format by storing outline information and then flood filling the enclosed areas on the screen. Many locations were illustrated by an image, based on originals designed by Kent Rees. The parser was complex and intuitive, introducing pronouns, adverbs ("viciously attack the goblin"), punctuation and prepositions and allowing the player to interact with the game world in ways not previously possible. When it was released most adventure games used simple verb-noun parsers (allowing for simple phrases like 'get lamp'), but Inglish allowed one to type advanced sentences such as "ask Gandalf about the curious map then take sword and kill troll with it". The parser was very advanced for the time and used a subset of English called Inglish. By arrangement with the book publishers, a copy of the book was included with each game sold.
#PLAY THE HOBBIT PC SOFTWARE#
It was developed at Beam Software by Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler and published by Melbourne House for most home computers available at the time, from more popular models such as the ZX Spectrum, the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC 464, BBC Micro, MSX, Dragon 32 and Oric. The Hobbit is an illustrated text adventure computer game released in 1982 and based on the book The Hobbit, by J.