x
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
> Hm... Isn't that the real question? What *kind* of language would we
> want and what features should it have? I know I can do a lot in
> Inform, but sometimes I really miss some basic-like string handling,
> for example for parsing topics. Just MID$ would be a great tool... ;-)
> But it's not about the little details, is it? It's about *style*. I
> wouldn't mind seeing something very unlike C to write IF in. Just for
> kicks ;-)
I'm currently writing "An Interactive Environment Engine" (yes, it's
named "Aiee!") in Java, using XML for the world definition. It's about
as different from other IF languages as you can get. It's primarily a
world description, not a programming language with rooms and items
tacked on the side.
The client's pretty weird, too. I'm designing it to be easier to use
from a Palm Pilot (much less mandatory typing than usual), and it'll be
easy to make a fully-graphical client for. In some ways the interface
is very primitive, more like first-generation parsers.
It is pretty capable--I've been using "Cloak of Darkness" as the
sample adventure to drive development, and it's easy to express the game
in it. Right now I can move around, but can't solve the game yet.
Here's what the foyer from cloak.xml looks like:
<room id="foyer" name="Foyer of the Opera House">
<look>
<text>You are standing in a spacious hall, splendidly decorated in red
and gold, with glittering chandeliers overhead. The entrance from the
street is to the north, and there are doorways south and west.</text>
</look>
<exit dir="s" room="bar"/>
<exit dir="w" room="cloakroom"/>
<exit dir="n">
<text>You've only just arrived, and besides, the weather outside seems to
be getting worse.</text>
</exit>
</room>
But my intent in developing it is more as a tool for computer-assisted
or fully-random adventure generation--it's easier to generate XML than
source for most IF languages, and I needed control over the language. I
doubt that there's a horde of potential IF authors who like typing angle
brackets.
If you just want "not like C", try ALAN.
--
<a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/"> Mark Hughes </a>
"We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in
order to minimize casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond
the stars to eat our brains." -Charlie Stross, _The Concrete Jungle_
Gadget
'Kamikaze' Hughes) wrote:
> Here's what the foyer from cloak.xml looks like:
>
> <room id="foyer" name="Foyer of the Opera House">
> <look>
> <text>You are standing in a spacious hall, splendidly decorated in red
> and gold, with glittering chandeliers overhead. The entrance from the
> street is to the north, and there are doorways south and west.</text>
> </look>
> <exit dir="s" room="bar"/>
> <exit dir="w" room="cloakroom"/>
> <exit dir="n">
> <text>You've only just arrived, and besides, the weather outside seems to
> be getting worse.</text>
> </exit>
> </room>
>
> But my intent in developing it is more as a tool for computer-assisted
>or fully-random adventure generation--it's easier to generate XML than
>source for most IF languages, and I needed control over the language. I
>doubt that there's a horde of potential IF authors who like typing angle
>brackets.
>
> If you just want "not like C", try ALAN.
I was so surprised when I saw this code... A couple of years back I
was writing an IF system very much like that. I based it on the HTML
idea of tags, and my theory was that I could more or less write a
story and add the interactivity with tags which would say 'this is an
object' or 'this is an exit to this and this room'.
I called it TATLe ... Text Adventure Tag Language...
On a related note: does anyone know if I can mount a Linux partition
under Win98? Then I can retrieve all the code for my abandoned
system...
Cheers,
Harry
-------------
It's a bird...
It's a plane...
No, it's... Gadget?
-------------------
To send mail remove SPAMBLOCK from adress.
Morgul
>under Win98? Then I can retrieve all the code for my abandoned
>system...
Not very related, I think, but yes, there are some tools to do it. Searching
with Google I can build a list of such tools for you:
- Paragon Ext2FS Anywhere 2.5 (Not free)
http://www.partition-manager.com/n_ext2fs_main.htm
Hey! I've found an interesting document that explains how to do it, and it
seems to name some free tools, here you are the link:
http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-2001-01/lw-01-legacy-p2.html
Regards,
Morgul
-=-=-=-=-*#*-=-=-=-=-
Miembro del Club Español de Aventuras AD (CAAD): http://caad.mine.nu
Página web personal aventurera http://www.geocities.com/jmfo1982
Usuario registrado de Linux nº 196150 en http://counter.li.org
Ally
news:ufeo1vgm0ujf23lb8...@4ax.com:
> On a related note: does anyone know if I can mount a Linux partition
> under Win98? Then I can retrieve all the code for my abandoned
> system...
"Knoppix" (a bootable-from-CD Linux distro) might be overkill, but I'm sure
it'd do the job just fine. http://knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
being flaky, and I didn't fix the subject when I reposted]
Wed, 08 Jan 2003 15:51:35 +0100, Gadget <gad...@SPAMBLOCKhaha.demon.nl>:
> On 7 Jan 2003 12:53:20 GMT, kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu (Mark
> 'Kamikaze' Hughes) wrote:
[An Interactive Environment Engine]
>> Here's what the foyer from cloak.xml looks like:
>> <room id="foyer" name="Foyer of the Opera House">
>> <look>
>> <text>You are standing in a spacious hall, splendidly decorated in red
>> and gold, with glittering chandeliers overhead. The entrance from the
>> street is to the north, and there are doorways south and west.</text>
>> </look>
>> <exit dir="s" room="bar"/>
>> <exit dir="w" room="cloakroom"/>
>> <exit dir="n">
>> <text>You've only just arrived, and besides, the weather outside seems to
>> be getting worse.</text>
>> </exit>
>> </room>
>>
> I was so surprised when I saw this code... A couple of years back I
> was writing an IF system very much like that. I based it on the HTML
> idea of tags, and my theory was that I could more or less write a
> story and add the interactivity with tags which would say 'this is an
> object' or 'this is an exit to this and this room'.
Yeah, I was a little surprised nobody'd appeared to have done it
before. SGML (which HTML is an application of) is a bitch to parse
reliably, mostly due to optional close tags. XML, OTOH, is so easy to
parse reliably, and it's so widely used for data description like
this... Just seemed like the natural tool for the job.
Aiee!'s not quite "write a story" (the more complex rooms are a bit of
a maze of twisty tags, all alike), but close.
Gadget
'Kamikaze' Hughes) wrote:
>> I was so surprised when I saw this code... A couple of years back I
>> was writing an IF system very much like that. I based it on the HTML
>> idea of tags, and my theory was that I could more or less write a
>> story and add the interactivity with tags which would say 'this is an
>> object' or 'this is an exit to this and this room'.
>
> Yeah, I was a little surprised nobody'd appeared to have done it
>before. SGML (which HTML is an application of) is a bitch to parse
>reliably, mostly due to optional close tags. XML, OTOH, is so easy to
>parse reliably, and it's so widely used for data description like
>this... Just seemed like the natural tool for the job.
>
> Aiee!'s not quite "write a story" (the more complex rooms are a bit of
>a maze of twisty tags, all alike), but close.
What I was wondering... I gave up on my language when I discovered
that I couldn't really find a way to include routines and the like in
the system... I could quite easily fill a decent database with room
and object descriptions this way but I couldn' actually *code* any
object interaction or new verbs... Right at the moment I decided that
I would still have to hand-code this in C in the terp for each game I
discovered Inform and abandoned the whole project. How do you handle
the actual coding part of a game?
Dan Shiovitz
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes <kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu> wrote:
>[sorry about the duplicate post, and the "x" subject--my newsfeed was
>being flaky, and I didn't fix the subject when I reposted]
[Mark's written an XML-based IF language]
> Yeah, I was a little surprised nobody'd appeared to have done it
>before. SGML (which HTML is an application of) is a bitch to parse
>reliably, mostly due to optional close tags. XML, OTOH, is so easy to
>parse reliably, and it's so widely used for data description like
>this... Just seemed like the natural tool for the job.
>
> Aiee!'s not quite "write a story" (the more complex rooms are a bit of
>a maze of twisty tags, all alike), but close.
A couple people have written XML-based IF languages before, actually.
I see, um, QML and IFML, and there might be one or two others. I think
the reason they failed to catch on was mostly lack of a good GUI and
insufficiently developed support for common IF tropes. What you
basically have is something like ADRIFT -- there's a form for each
object, and you fill in the form and check the boxes to make the
object. All the logic is hard-coded in the interpreter.
If the user has to write the XML themselves you don't get much of an
audience, since, like, at that point the leap to just using one of the
more common IF languages is not as great (but then the catch here is
that if you're using a visual creation tool it doesn't really matter
what the underlying data representation is since the user never sees it).
This is doubly true if you try and encode any programming logic in the
XML, since the format isn't really designed for that.
--
Dan Shiovitz :: d...@cs.wisc.edu :: http://www.drizzle.com/~dans
"He settled down to dictate a letter to the Consolidated Nailfile and
Eyebrow Tweezer Corporation of Scranton, Pa., which would make them
realize that life is stern and earnest and Nailfile and Eyebrow Tweezer
Corporations are not put in this world for pleasure alone." -PGW
Mark W
> If the user has to write the XML themselves you don't get much of an
> audience, since, like, at that point the leap to just using one of the
> more common IF languages is not as great (but then the catch here is
> that if you're using a visual creation tool it doesn't really matter
> what the underlying data representation is since the user never sees it).
> This is doubly true if you try and encode any programming logic in the
> XML, since the format isn't really designed for that.
But there are GUI XML editors which would make easy work of the job...
XMLSpy is a favorite of mine.
Regards,
Mark
--
http://www.marktaw.com/
Mark W
news:b11p1v4ldtgu092v8...@4ax.com:
> What I was wondering... I gave up on my language when I discovered
> that I couldn't really find a way to include routines and the like in
> the system...
What about inside CDATA tags?
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
I'm using tags that do programming actions. <examine>, <exit>, etc.
can contain a series of tags, making a "routine". The most common one
is the <text> tag, which is effectively a "print" statement. The
semantics are not all that different from Inform, it's just that I don't
compile to an intermediate byte-code.
It's easy in my design to add new custom tags to the parser. Some of
these are programmer-ish, though I don't expect most games will have
that many of those. I could have modified Cloak of Darkness to
eliminate the programming tags almost entirely, but I need to design and
test those tags anyway.
For instance:
<item id="message" loc="bar" name="scrawled message">
<alias name="message"/>
<alias name="floor"/>
<alias name="sawdust"/>
<invisible/>
<!-- make it too heavy to take -->
<weight value="9999"/>
<examine>
<if><test var="damage" op="lt">2</test>
<then>
<score value="1"/>
<text>The message, neatly marked in the sawdust, reads...\n\n
\t*** You have won ***\n</text>
</then>
<else>
<text>The message has been carelessly trampled, making it difficult
to read. You can just distinguish the words...\n\n
\t*** You have lost ***\n</text>
</else>
</if>
<gameover/>
</examine>
</item>
I could have renamed <if> to pretend it was less programmerish, but
why? It still boils down to "if foo then bar else quux".
I'm probably not going to allow any new verbs, but if I was, they
could easily be added to the <game> tag with something like:
<game>
<verb name="xyzzy"><moveto loc="whiteroom"/></verb>
</game>
The one good justification I can think of for new verbs is for
vehicles, which can be "faked" with actors, or I may extend the system
to include vehicles if they're really necessary. Actors do have an
"ask" command which takes arbitrary text, and can pattern-match it. You
can build Eliza as an actor...
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
Right. I use Vim <http://www.vim.org/>, and the XML syntax
highlighting is great. I don't have to write syntax files for every
programmer's editor on the planet, because most of them already support
XML.
As for Dan's comment about programming logic, it's quite easy to
express that in XML. Any current programming language can trivially be
converted into XML structures. It's just a structured text format,
after all. For instance, there's a tool that generates an XML
representation of a Java source file, because the XML is easier for
other software to work with than trying to parse Java directly.
However, as I initially said, Aiee! is primarily intended as a target
language for my adventure generation tool. I don't think most people
want to write XML tags. I might be wrong, though--Lisp was never
intended for end-user programmers to use, either, it was supposed to be
an intermediary step between a decent HLL and the compiler, but some
people actually liked working in it.
Dan Shiovitz
>> d...@cs.wisc.edu (Dan Shiovitz) wrote in news:avighu$48v$1...@drizzle.com:
>>> If the user has to write the XML themselves you don't get much of an
>>> audience, since, like, at that point the leap to just using one of the
>>> more common IF languages is not as great (but then the catch here is
>>> that if you're using a visual creation tool it doesn't really matter
>>> what the underlying data representation is since the user never sees it).
>>> This is doubly true if you try and encode any programming logic in the
>>> XML, since the format isn't really designed for that.
>> But there are GUI XML editors which would make easy work of the job...
>> XMLSpy is a favorite of mine.
>
> Right. I use Vim <http://www.vim.org/>, and the XML syntax
>highlighting is great. I don't have to write syntax files for every
>programmer's editor on the planet, because most of them already support
>XML.
>
> As for Dan's comment about programming logic, it's quite easy to
>express that in XML. Any current programming language can trivially be
>converted into XML structures. It's just a structured text format,
>after all. For instance, there's a tool that generates an XML
>representation of a Java source file, because the XML is easier for
>other software to work with than trying to parse Java directly.
Right, sure, but you're still telling the user they have to write
angle-bracket-r-o-o-m-close-angle-bracket (or maybe, if you're using
an xml editor, angle-bracket-r-o-tab-to-complete). By the time you
finish explaining they need to download an xml editor, and learn how
to use its auto-complete features, and learn what all the tags are and
stuff, you could just have given them the Inform manual or the TADS
manual or something.
The programming logic issue is similar -- obviously you can represent any
tree-like thing in XML, but there's no real benefit from the author's
perspective in writing in XML over a more standard language -- the XML
is way more verbose and requires about as much learning.
> However, as I initially said, Aiee! is primarily intended as a target
>language for my adventure generation tool. I don't think most people
>want to write XML tags. I might be wrong, though--Lisp was never
>intended for end-user programmers to use, either, it was supposed to be
>an intermediary step between a decent HLL and the compiler, but some
>people actually liked working in it.
Exactly, it's a fine format for saving data produced by an automatic
tool, I just don't think you're likely to get many people queuing up
to write it by hand, or at least the other XML-based languages I
mentioned don't seem to have been particularly successful.
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
> In article <slrnb1qfu4.2...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu>,
> Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes <kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu> wrote:
>> As for Dan's comment about programming logic, it's quite easy to
>>express that in XML. Any current programming language can trivially be
>>converted into XML structures. It's just a structured text format,
>>after all. For instance, there's a tool that generates an XML
>>representation of a Java source file, because the XML is easier for
>>other software to work with than trying to parse Java directly.
> Right, sure, but you're still telling the user they have to write
> angle-bracket-r-o-o-m-close-angle-bracket (or maybe, if you're using
> an xml editor, angle-bracket-r-o-tab-to-complete). By the time you
> finish explaining they need to download an xml editor, and learn how
> to use its auto-complete features, and learn what all the tags are and
> stuff, you could just have given them the Inform manual or the TADS
> manual or something.
Um, what? A manual can't easily tell people to type nice regular XML?
<room id="cloakroom" name="Cloakroom">
...
But it can easily tell people to type Inform's freaky mutant syntax?
Object cloakroom "Cloakroom"
with description
"The walls of this small room were clearly once lined with hooks,
though now only one remains. The exit is a door to the east.",
e_to foyer,
has light;
That's just nonsensical. Maybe you didn't drink enough coffee this
morning...
Big hint: HTML is closely related to XML. Millions of people manage
to write HTML by hand every single day. How did those millions of
people learn to write HTML?
> The programming logic issue is similar -- obviously you can represent any
> tree-like thing in XML, but there's no real benefit from the author's
> perspective in writing in XML over a more standard language
This I agree with, mostly, although the very regular syntax of XML is
significantly easier to learn than the psychotic syntax of most homebrew
languages. Newbies can learn the XML rules in a few minutes (leaving
out DTDs and such, which my parser doesn't support anyway), but will
often end up resorting to trial-and-error to make more "human" languages
do what they want.
>-- the XML
> is way more verbose and requires about as much learning.
Huh? Verbose?
% wc cloak.*
249 706 6463 cloak.alan
123 505 4509 cloak.inf
173 609 4341 cloak.tads
157 565 5095 cloak.xml
Same exact functionality, only slightly larger than Inform (and much
less complex), slightly smaller than TADS (and slightly less complex),
quite a lot less than ALAN (but slightly more complex).
I still think ALAN's the best IF language out there right now, though.
Far simpler to work with than Inform or TADS. Doesn't encourage
language-geekery, so you concentrate on the adventure. Reasonably
widely ported. About the only irritant is that it makes fiddling with
the parser for guess-the-verb or guess-the-syntax games too easy.
Sam Dennis
> [XML based IF language]
> Big hint: HTML is closely related to XML. Millions of people manage
> to write HTML by hand every single day. How did those millions of
> people learn to write HTML?
Not very well I would say, having seen some of what's out there.
--
++acr@,ka"
Quintin Stone
> Big hint: HTML is closely related to XML. Millions of people manage
> to write HTML by hand every single day. How did those millions of
> people learn to write HTML?
MS Frontpage? :)
/====================================================================\
|| Quintin Stone O- > "You speak of necessary evil? One ||
|| Weapons Master & Coder < of those necessities is that if ||
|| Rebel Programmers Society > innocents must suffer, the guilty must ||
|| st...@rps.net < suffer more." -- Mackenzie Calhoun ||
|| http://www.rps.net/ > "Once Burned" by Peter David ||
\====================================================================/
Mike Roberts
> than the psychotic syntax of most homebrew languages. Newbies
Are you supposing that your system will accept any well-formed XML that a
newbie might write after those few minutes of instruction? Or will your
system have some restrictions on where, say, <WEIGHT> or <THEN> tags can go?
I'd guess there is going to be a difference between well-formed and valid
XML in your system, in which case there will be some learning to do beyond
the basic XML syntax. I'd also guess that this extra learning is remarkably
similar in scope to what one has to learn to use Inform, TADS, or any of the
other psychotic systems.
I don't at all mean to discourage you; I just think you're proceeding from a
false assumption if you think the hard part in the psychotic languages is
getting the semicolons right. The semicolons might indeed be a hurdle for
newcomers, but I think the difficulty of that hurdle is often overstated.
--Mike
mjr underscore at hotmail dot com
Stephen Granade
> I'm probably not going to allow any new verbs, but if I was, they
> could easily be added to the <game> tag with something like:
> <game>
> <verb name="xyzzy"><moveto loc="whiteroom"/></verb>
> </game>
>
> The one good justification I can think of for new verbs is for
> vehicles, which can be "faked" with actors, or I may extend the system
> to include vehicles if they're really necessary.
Wait -- you're planning on having a system in which all of the verbs
you need are given to you, and it is more-or-less impossible to add
new ones?
I'd strongly suggest the ability to add more verbs, and as an example
from the past I will point to GAGS. GAGS, the Generic Adventure Game
System, was extremely hard-coded. It lacked the ability to define new
verbs, and prior to version 1.06 you could not make aliases for
existing verbs. Because of this, most all of the GAGS games feel about
the same.
Chances are you could cover a wide range of actions by taking the
default verbs available in TADS, Hugo, and Inform; but as an author I
can guarantee you I'll need verbs you haven't thought of.
Stephen
--
Stephen Granade
ste...@granades.com
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
> "Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes" <kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu> wrote:
>> [...] the very regular syntax of XML is significantly easier to learn
>> than the psychotic syntax of most homebrew languages. Newbies
>> can learn the XML rules in a few minutes [...].
> Are you supposing that your system will accept any well-formed XML that a
> newbie might write after those few minutes of instruction? Or will your
> system have some restrictions on where, say, <WEIGHT> or <THEN> tags can go?
> I'd guess there is going to be a difference between well-formed and valid
> XML in your system, in which case there will be some learning to do beyond
> the basic XML syntax. I'd also guess that this extra learning is remarkably
> similar in scope to what one has to learn to use Inform, TADS, or any of the
> other psychotic systems.
Yes, the difficulty of getting the keywords right is exactly the same
in both a "human" language and XML. That's why I addressed *syntax*,
not semantics or vocabulary.
I don't deny that XML is uglier--I wouldn't care to work in it all the
time, I'd rather learn the rules of a more pleasant language. See also
Lisp for an example of inhumanly ugly but very regular syntax.
But there are advantages to regular, ugly syntax over complex,
arbitrary, pretty syntax.
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
> kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu (Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes) writes:
>> I'm probably not going to allow any new verbs, but if I was, they
> you need are given to you, and it is more-or-less impossible to add
> new ones?
Correct.
> I'd strongly suggest the ability to add more verbs, and as an example
> from the past I will point to GAGS. GAGS, the Generic Adventure Game
> System, was extremely hard-coded. It lacked the ability to define new
> verbs, and prior to version 1.06 you could not make aliases for
> existing verbs. Because of this, most all of the GAGS games feel about
> the same.
> Chances are you could cover a wide range of actions by taking the
> default verbs available in TADS, Hugo, and Inform; but as an author I
> can guarantee you I'll need verbs you haven't thought of.
What verbs do people need? Give me a good justification for a verb I
don't have, and I might add it.
Keep in mind that the interface needs to be portable across a wide
range of devices, from PDAs to fully-graphical games. Most additional
verbs are simulated with the "use" command. Eating, drinking, pushing
buttons, whatever, those are just guess-the-verb games, which I find
more annoying than just about anything else. I think players have a
good idea what will happen when they "use bread".
The only reason I'm giving actors access to keywords at all is because
I dislike menu-based conversation systems. I've been considering a
middle ground, where keywords have to be "activated" by the actor's
speech (probably with "hi" common to everyone), and a command will list
most of the activated keywords for the player (can't list passwords,
obviously).
If you *like* making guess-the-verb games, other languages exist
already.
Richard Bos
> Fri, 10 Jan 2003 00:26:33 GMT, Stephen Granade <ste...@granades.com>:
> > Chances are you could cover a wide range of actions by taking the
> > default verbs available in TADS, Hugo, and Inform; but as an author I
> > can guarantee you I'll need verbs you haven't thought of.
>
> What verbs do people need? Give me a good justification for a verb I
> don't have, and I might add it.
Everything. I want "frobnicate" when I write a game that uses magic. I
want "sautee" when the game is set in a kitchen. Even more importantly,
I do not want to be stuck with _just_ "sautee", and "sautee" and
"stir-fry" _must_ be distinguishable.
> Keep in mind that the interface needs to be portable across a wide
> range of devices, from PDAs to fully-graphical games. Most additional
> verbs are simulated with the "use" command.
Ewwww! Why not just include the "win game" command?
> Eating, drinking, pushing
> buttons, whatever, those are just guess-the-verb games, which I find
> more annoying than just about anything else. I think players have a
> good idea what will happen when they "use bread".
Yeah, it gets fed to the ducks. No? Well, that's what _I_ meant when I
typed "use bread"...
Richard
Quintin Stone
> What verbs do people need? Give me a good justification for a verb I
> don't have, and I might add it.
>
> Keep in mind that the interface needs to be portable across a wide
> range of devices, from PDAs to fully-graphical games. Most additional
> verbs are simulated with the "use" command. Eating, drinking, pushing
> buttons, whatever, those are just guess-the-verb games, which I find
> more annoying than just about anything else. I think players have a
> good idea what will happen when they "use bread".
>
> The only reason I'm giving actors access to keywords at all is because
> I dislike menu-based conversation systems. I've been considering a
> middle ground, where keywords have to be "activated" by the actor's
> speech (probably with "hi" common to everyone), and a command will list
> most of the activated keywords for the player (can't list passwords,
> obviously).
>
> If you *like* making guess-the-verb games, other languages exist
> already.
You're honestly serious about this? I guess you're entitled to your
opinion that "eat food" is a guess-the-verb puzzle. However, I doubt that
you'll find even a handful of modern IF players who would agree with you.
IF is supposed to be about immersion and the preservation of memesis. I
can't think situations more jarringly mood-breaking than having to type
"use bread" in order to eat it.
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
> kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu (Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes) wrote:
>> Fri, 10 Jan 2003 00:26:33 GMT, Stephen Granade <ste...@granades.com>:
>> > Chances are you could cover a wide range of actions by taking the
>> > default verbs available in TADS, Hugo, and Inform; but as an author I
>> > can guarantee you I'll need verbs you haven't thought of.
>> What verbs do people need? Give me a good justification for a verb I
>> don't have, and I might add it.
> Everything. I want "frobnicate" when I write a game that uses magic. I
> want "sautee" when the game is set in a kitchen. Even more importantly,
> I do not want to be stuck with _just_ "sautee", and "sautee" and
> "stir-fry" _must_ be distinguishable.
Bzzt. You presented no justification at all for those, and those are
exactly the kind of guess-the-verb games I find completely awful and
intolerable. The first time I reach one of those in a new game, I quit
and delete the game. No joke. Magic words were cute in Adventure, 25
years ago. Just like the first Maze of Twisty Passages was. But now
it's *lame* and manipulative.
Not that I'd be playing the Iron Chef computer game, anyway, but
unusual actions like cooking can be done without playing guess-the-verb.
For a game where it's an irrelevant activity:
Kitchen
]use frying pan
You make scrambled eggs for breakfast. You're full now.
Or the detailed version:
Kitchen
]put frying pan on stove
You put the frying pan on the stove.
]put egg in frying pan
You break the egg and pour it into the pan.
]use stove
The egg begins cooking.
]z
Time passes...
The egg is almost done.
]z
Time passes...
The egg is cooked. You turn the stove off. Smells good.
]use egg
Right out of the pan?
You totally sear your tongue. The pain is unbearable.
*** YOU HAVE DIED. ***
Your score is 0 out of 32767.
>> Keep in mind that the interface needs to be portable across a wide
>> range of devices, from PDAs to fully-graphical games. Most additional
>> verbs are simulated with the "use" command.
> Ewwww! Why not just include the "win game" command?
You've got that the wrong way around. You want to add secret "win
game" commands; if the player can guess your password from each room,
the plot leaps forward. I want to use a small, consistent vocabulary so
the player can concentrate on the setting, characters, and puzzles.
Like I said, though, if you want to inflict guess-the-verb games on
players, use another language. I won't play your game, but I won't stop
you, either. Not every text adventure language has to be Inform.
Stephen Granade
> Fri, 10 Jan 2003 00:26:33 GMT, Stephen Granade <ste...@granades.com>:
> > kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu (Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes) writes:
> >> I'm probably not going to allow any new verbs, but if I was, they
> > Wait -- you're planning on having a system in which all of the verbs
> > you need are given to you, and it is more-or-less impossible to add
> > new ones?
>
> Correct.
>
> > I'd strongly suggest the ability to add more verbs, and as an example
> > from the past I will point to GAGS. GAGS, the Generic Adventure Game
> > System, was extremely hard-coded. It lacked the ability to define new
> > verbs, and prior to version 1.06 you could not make aliases for
> > existing verbs. Because of this, most all of the GAGS games feel about
> > the same.
> > Chances are you could cover a wide range of actions by taking the
> > default verbs available in TADS, Hugo, and Inform; but as an author I
> > can guarantee you I'll need verbs you haven't thought of.
>
> What verbs do people need? Give me a good justification for a verb I
> don't have, and I might add it.
I doubt I'll be able to give you a justification you'd be satisfied
with, given what you say later. However, I'll try at the end of this
message.
> Keep in mind that the interface needs to be portable across a wide
> range of devices, from PDAs to fully-graphical games. Most additional
> verbs are simulated with the "use" command.
Is your plan, then, to have an interface similar to the later SCUMM
games, with its actions token containing a few verbs, with the text
version merely accepting those limited subset of verbs?
> Eating, drinking, pushing
> buttons, whatever, those are just guess-the-verb games, which I find
> more annoying than just about anything else. I think players have a
> good idea what will happen when they "use bread".
If I understand you correctly, your claim is that the use of verbs
specific to an action, such as "push" and "eat," instantly devolve
into guess the verb? Eeyah. And to top it off, you want to support
your statement with a blanket condemnation of all those other little
systems like TADS et al?
> If you *like* making guess-the-verb games, other languages exist
> already.
Geez. I was trying to give honest feedback, and now you've gone and
told me that all I've been doing is making guess-the-verb games, and
by the by implying that I'm an idiot for doing so.
There is a continuum between guess-the-verb and
one-verb-fits-all. When you add verbs, in general you're making a tradeoff
between realism and ease of game play. But this problem can be
mitigated by appropriate in-game clues, along with verb synonyms and
alternate command phrasings.
There is a certain feeling of satisfaction players get from performing
actions in games, and use of a single "use" verb undermines that. In
addition, there are situations where guessing what the player meant by
"use" is problematic. For instance, say the PC is a nurse who is in
charge of an old woman on a gurney. The player needs to wheel the woman
into her room. Once the woman is in the room, her heart will stop and
the player will be asked to perform CPR. What commands will the player
type in? >USE GURNEY ON NORTH? >USE WOMAN? >USE HANDS ON WOMAN?
Frankly, I'd rather be able to type >PUSH GURNEY NORTH and >PERFORM
CPR (or >PUSH WOMAN'S CHEST or other similar formulations). In the
quest to avoid guess-the-verb puzzles, you've invented a new problem:
guess-how-to-recast-verbs-as-use puzzles.
And that doesn't even cover the games for which USE fails
entirely. See, for example, the competition game EDIFICE for a
highly-praised puzzle which absolutely could not be done in the system
you are suggesting.
In thinking more about it, I believe that you're setting yourself such
a wide problem -- having an interface that is consistent across text
and graphical games -- that you're likely to end up with a solution
that satisfies one extreme or the other, but not both. Text-based
games have a fundamentally different feel than graphical ones, and I
don't think the interface that is well-suited for one will be
well-suited for the other.
Stephen
--
Stephen Granade
sgra...@phy.duke.edu
Duke University, Physics Dept
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
> kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu (Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes) writes:
>> Keep in mind that the interface needs to be portable across a wide
>> range of devices, from PDAs to fully-graphical games. Most additional
>> verbs are simulated with the "use" command.
> Is your plan, then, to have an interface similar to the later SCUMM
> games, with its actions token containing a few verbs, with the text
> version merely accepting those limited subset of verbs?
Not SCUMM-like. The graphical games will still be traditional text
adventures, just allowing image and sound markup, and perhaps a heavily
mouse-driven interface. That doesn't work if you can type any verb at
any time, but does if you've got a small, consistent vocabulary.
>> Eating, drinking, pushing
>> buttons, whatever, those are just guess-the-verb games, which I find
>> more annoying than just about anything else. I think players have a
>> good idea what will happen when they "use bread".
> If I understand you correctly, your claim is that the use of verbs
> specific to an action, such as "push" and "eat," instantly devolve
> into guess the verb? Eeyah. And to top it off, you want to support
> your statement with a blanket condemnation of all those other little
> systems like TADS et al?
I'm not condeming the systems, or even all authors who use them. I'm
saying that I, personally, greatly dislike a style of game too often
made with those systems. You're reading things into my message that are
completely not present.
I don't actively dislike very simple verbs like "eat", "drink", etc.,
but those are at the top of a slippery slope leading down to Richard's
nightmare example of "sautee" vs. "stir-fry".
I plan to stay well away from that slope.
>> If you *like* making guess-the-verb games, other languages exist
>> already.
> Geez. I was trying to give honest feedback, and now you've gone and
> told me that all I've been doing is making guess-the-verb games, and
> by the by implying that I'm an idiot for doing so.
I was not insulting you personally, just stating a blunt fact--if you
want to make guess-the-verb games, my system will intentionally never
suit you, and other systems will.
That was a generic "you", read "one" for a more pompous version of
English: "If one *likes* making guess-the-verb games, other languages
exist already."
> There is a continuum between guess-the-verb and
> one-verb-fits-all. When you add verbs, in general you're making a tradeoff
> between realism and ease of game play. But this problem can be
> mitigated by appropriate in-game clues, along with verb synonyms and
> alternate command phrasings.
It has a tradeoff for the game author, as well as the player--the
author spends more time chasing down all possible words to use on an
object or room, and less time on the *game*. The impolite term I came
up with for that is "verbwanking", after I was in a small group of
developers who tried to make some IF together and wasted entirely too
much time on the verbs.
> There is a certain feeling of satisfaction players get from performing
> actions in games, and use of a single "use" verb undermines that. In
<boggle> Typing "frobnosticate" makes the player feel good, but "use"
does not? Pardon me while I laugh at you. Certainly what I feel when I
finally guess the verb is release from the almost uncontrollable urge to
strangle the author. That's not satisfaction, though.
As for your medical example, Aiee! does have skills, which are treated
as conceptual items in your inventory. So you can "use first aid on
woman". Sure, you could use that to shoehorn in new verbs, except that
the verbs can never be hidden from the player.
What I find funny and pathetic is that I mentioned one verb from my
interface, and you instantly leaped to assume that that's the only word
in the interface, and that I must design like a complete moron just
because I don't like the baroque style of interface you do.
Just so you don't come up with further fantasy flaws, the current
command list is:
a[sk] CREATURE SUBJECT Ask CREATURE about SUBJECT
c[lose] ITEM Close ITEM
d[rop] ITEM Drop ITEM
g[o] DIR Go DIR (n|ne|e|se|s|sw|w|nw|u|d)
h[int] Hint about this room (Special)
help Help about AIEE (Special)
i[nv] Inventory (Special)
k[ill] CREATURE ITEM Kill CREATURE with ITEM
l[ook] [TARGET] Look at room or TARGET (item or creature)
log Activates or deactivates logging (Special)
o[pen] ITEM Open ITEM
p[ut] ITEM1 ITEM2 Put ITEM1 in ITEM2
quit Quit game (Special)
r[emove] ITEM1 ITEM2 Remove ITEM1 from ITEM2
restart Erases current game and restarts it (Special)
restore Restore game from savefile (Special)
save Save game to savefile (Special)
score Report your current score (Special)
t[ake] ITEM Take ITEM
u[se] ITEM [TARGET] Use ITEM, optionally on TARGET (item or creature)
version Reports the version of AIEE (Special)
w[ear/ield] ITEM Wear/Wield or Take off ITEM
Direct and indirect objects are usually separated by prepositions.
If anyone has useful suggestions of missing commands, and can do so
politely and with an actual explanation of what they're good for and why
they can't be done some simpler way, I would still like to hear them.
Otherwise, I'll consider the question closed.
Fraser Wilson
> As for your medical example, Aiee! does have skills, which are treated
> as conceptual items in your inventory. So you can "use first aid on
> woman".
Haven't you moved from verbwankery to directobjectwankery with this
example? And isn't that inevitable? If you reduce the number of
different verbs, then the number of potential actions goes down,
unless you increase the number of direct objects or interpret the
remaining verb in increasingly "shoehorned" ways.
> What I find funny and pathetic is that I mentioned one verb from my
> interface, and you instantly leaped to assume that that's the only word
> in the interface, and that I must design like a complete moron just
> because I don't like the baroque style of interface you do.
Why so defensive? Nobody's called you a moron, or leaped to the
particular assumption you mention. On the other hand, you're dishing
out a fair bit ("pathetic" "baroque style") in response to all these
imagined slights. Have you read some of the competition reviews?
Many are a lot harsher than anything you've had to put up with so far.
> If anyone has useful suggestions of missing commands, and can do so
> politely and with an actual explanation of what they're good for and why
> they can't be done some simpler way, I would still like to hear them.
Mate, I'm way too scared.
Fraser.
Ross Presser
news:slrnb1tqg9....@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu:
> I don't actively dislike very simple verbs like "eat", "drink", etc.,
> but those are at the top of a slippery slope leading down to Richard's
> nightmare example of "sautee" vs. "stir-fry".
>
There is a difference between designing games and writing fiction. In
theory, any novel could be written in terms of your "very simple verbs".
Does that make it a better novel?
Sure, programmers want to make things simple and straightforward. And
artists want things to be expressive. If the programmer is unwilling to
budge on simplicity, then the artist will be frustrated. He may produce an
unfulfilling work; he may turn to other tools or media; or he may give up
altogether. What has the programmer gained?
Fraser Wilson
> kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu (Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes) writes:
>
> > As for your medical example, Aiee! does have skills, which are treated
> > as conceptual items in your inventory. So you can "use first aid on
> > woman".
> Haven't you moved from verbwankery to directobjectwankery with this
> example?
Oh, wait on, re-reading what you said, does this imply that any
potential direct object of a command appears explicitly in scope?
Well, then. That's a different issue from directobjectwankery of
course.
Fraser.
Stephen Granade
> 10 Jan 2003 09:55:37 -0500, Stephen Granade <sgra...@phy.duke.edu>:
> > kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu (Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes) writes:
> >> Eating, drinking, pushing
> >> buttons, whatever, those are just guess-the-verb games, which I find
> >> more annoying than just about anything else. I think players have a
> >> good idea what will happen when they "use bread".
> > If I understand you correctly, your claim is that the use of verbs
> > specific to an action, such as "push" and "eat," instantly devolve
> > into guess the verb? Eeyah. And to top it off, you want to support
> > your statement with a blanket condemnation of all those other little
> > systems like TADS et al?
>
> I'm not condeming the systems, or even all authors who use them. I'm
> saying that I, personally, greatly dislike a style of game too often
> made with those systems. You're reading things into my message that are
> completely not present.
Then I apologize. I read that into your message because you seemed to
be lumping *all* games written with current systems as
guess-the-verb. Guess-the-verb has been recognized for a long time as
a Bad Thing; I hope you can understand why I and others might not like
the implication that that's all we've been doing.
> > There is a certain feeling of satisfaction players get from performing
> > actions in games, and use of a single "use" verb undermines that. In
>
> <boggle> Typing "frobnosticate" makes the player feel good, but "use"
> does not? Pardon me while I laugh at you.
Ah, good. I'm glad we're having a polite, non-insulting discussion.
> Certainly what I feel when I finally guess the verb is release from
> the almost uncontrollable urge to strangle the author. That's not
> satisfaction, though.
I was not suggesting that having to guess the verb leads to player
satisfaction. I'm saying there is satisfaction in *doing things* in a
game, and further more in doing exactly as I intended to do them,
instead of potentially having unexpected side-effects when I "use"
something.
IF as it is commonly written has settled on a middle ground between a
handful of verbs and an unlimited set of verbs. There is a
commonly-used subset of verbs; those verbs can be learned either
through playing a number of games or by reading the instructions
included with some games or on IF web sites. More uncommon or
game-specific verbs can be included, but should be hinted at or be
ones that people are likely to imagine.
> What I find funny and pathetic is that I mentioned one verb from my
> interface, and you instantly leaped to assume that that's the only word
> in the interface, and that I must design like a complete moron just
> because I don't like the baroque style of interface you do.
>
> Just so you don't come up with further fantasy flaws, the current
> command list is:
Now it's my turn to say that you're reading things into my message
that weren't there. You said you probably wouldn't allow the addition
of more verbs. I explained why I thought this was a bad idea. You
replied that having the ability to add verbs was a bad idea, and that
people would know what to expect if they typed "use bread." I assumed
that that would be your *major* verb for interacting with objects,
ignoring such specialty ones as travel and picking up or dropping
objects. And indeed, looking at the list you provided, that is the
case.
You seem to be setting up straw men from my comments, knocking them
down, and in the process shoving words in my mouth faster than I can
spit them out. I have been trying to explain why I think the middle
ground IF has in general chosen is a good idea; it seems you disagree
and are in fact uninterested in hearing my reasoning.
Quintin Stone
> Keep in mind that the interface needs to be portable across a wide
> range of devices, from PDAs to fully-graphical games. Most additional
> verbs are simulated with the "use" command. Eating, drinking, pushing
> buttons, whatever, those are just guess-the-verb games, which I find
> more annoying than just about anything else. I think players have a
> good idea what will happen when they "use bread".
The problem with this is that there are many games which introduce new
verbs with the clear and explicit introduction of these verbs to the
player. "Worlds Apart" for instance, the game I'm trying to get through
right now, introduces particular actions that the player can perform in
order to interact differently with objects and other entities. However,
none of them are "guess-the-verb" since they're directly presented to the
player as new concepts. There's nothing to guess. I have played games
which expected the nonobvious commands of "agree" or "disagree" without
any cluing to the player that these were legitimate commands. However, I
certainly don't blame TADS or Inform. It's just bad authoring.
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
> kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu (Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes) writes:
>> Certainly what I feel when I finally guess the verb is release from
>> the almost uncontrollable urge to strangle the author. That's not
>> satisfaction, though.
> I was not suggesting that having to guess the verb leads to player
> satisfaction. I'm saying there is satisfaction in *doing things* in a
> game, and further more in doing exactly as I intended to do them,
> instead of potentially having unexpected side-effects when I "use"
> something.
There's no distinction there. The game author could have anything
happen when you "eat apple"; it could as easily blow up the planet as
stop your hunger. As a player, you trust that the author will do
something sane, and will get irritated if the author violates that
trust. Why should that change just because the action is more general?
And why would that give the player any kind of "satisfaction"?
The player does get enjoyment from any game, text adventures included,
by doing things. But the specific means of doing them is just the user
interface. If the interface makes getting things done difficult, as in
guess-the-verb games, or by screen-scraping in a graphics adventure,
then that's just a lousy interface. Otherwise, the interface ought to
be invisible.
> IF as it is commonly written has settled on a middle ground between a
> handful of verbs and an unlimited set of verbs. There is a
> commonly-used subset of verbs; those verbs can be learned either
> through playing a number of games or by reading the instructions
> included with some games or on IF web sites. More uncommon or
> game-specific verbs can be included, but should be hinted at or be
> ones that people are likely to imagine.
We're talking past each other. I doubt we can be very productive in
conversation until that changes. From my perspective, you impart a lot
of very uncharitable motive to me that isn't there, and read my slightly
sarcastic tone as an abusive personal attack. In the unlikely event
that I ever want to make an abusive personal attack, you'll know it.
I've stated my motives upthread, but for a bit of clarification:
I'm not interested in "IF as it is commonly written", not in the
slightest. There's plenty of IF languages around for that, and I've
written at least test games with many of them, and played games in even
more. The world does not need yet another Inform clone, and I am
totally uninterested in making Aiee! into one.
I don't even use the term "Interactive Fiction" for Aiee!. "An
interactive environment engine" is exactly what it is, "text adventure"
or "adventure game" if you must.
All I'm interested in digging for in the group, at least for now, is
things I may have missed, that are difficult or impossible to express in
my vocabulary. I'd like things to stay focused on *that*. If you're
not willing to cooperate in that, just mosey on past the thread.
Andrew Plotkin
> There is a continuum between guess-the-verb and
> one-verb-fits-all.
And the important thing about this continuum is, the fun is all in the
middle. You can't use the flaws of one extreme to justify moving to
the opposite extreme.
> In thinking more about it, I believe that you're setting yourself such
> a wide problem -- having an interface that is consistent across text
> and graphical games -- that you're likely to end up with a solution
> that satisfies one extreme or the other, but not both.
[Just to be clear, these are not the same extremes I was just talking
about.]
> Text-based games have a fundamentally different feel than graphical
> ones, and I don't think the interface that is well-suited for one
> will be well-suited for the other.
What I've found -- and I've posted about this before -- is that both
graphical and text games have this same continuum of "there's only one
thing to do" vs "it's totally unclear what to do". But they express it
in utterly different *aspects* of the game experience.
If this is indeed a general principle of game design, then it can be
applied in entirely new ways -- that would be interesting. But you're
not going to make the equivalency work by saying "Well, in a text game
you can either pick up, drop, or eat the mushroom. So I should create
a graphical game in which you can either pick up, drop, or eat the
mushroom; and this will provide the same experience and the same level
of challenge." That's too shallow an analysis.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
* Make your vote count. Get your vote counted.
Gadget
'Kamikaze' Hughes) wrote:
>
> Bzzt. You presented no justification at all for those, and those are
>exactly the kind of guess-the-verb games I find completely awful and
>intolerable. The first time I reach one of those in a new game, I quit
>and delete the game. No joke. Magic words were cute in Adventure, 25
>years ago. Just like the first Maze of Twisty Passages was. But now
>it's *lame* and manipulative.
>
> Not that I'd be playing the Iron Chef computer game, anyway, but
>unusual actions like cooking can be done without playing guess-the-verb.
>
> For a game where it's an irrelevant activity:
>Kitchen
>]use frying pan
>You make scrambled eggs for breakfast. You're full now.
>
But I didn't WANT to eat 'em!
> Or the detailed version:
>Kitchen
>]put frying pan on stove
>You put the frying pan on the stove.
>]put egg in frying pan
>You break the egg and pour it into the pan.
>]use stove
>The egg begins cooking.
>]z
>Time passes...
>The egg is almost done.
>]z
>Time passes...
>The egg is cooked. You turn the stove off. Smells good.
>]use egg
>Right out of the pan?
>You totally sear your tongue. The pain is unbearable.
>*** YOU HAVE DIED. ***
>Your score is 0 out of 32767.
>
Okay, you basically just took the piss out of the main puzzle of my
game. I won't get mad. *sigh*. But I get the feeling you have a
completely different idea of what *interactive* fiction is about then
at least my own.
>>> Keep in mind that the interface needs to be portable across a wide
>>> range of devices, from PDAs to fully-graphical games. Most additional
>>> verbs are simulated with the "use" command.
>> Ewwww! Why not just include the "win game" command?
>
> You've got that the wrong way around. You want to add secret "win
>game" commands; if the player can guess your password from each room,
>the plot leaps forward. I want to use a small, consistent vocabulary so
>the player can concentrate on the setting, characters, and puzzles.
>Like I said, though, if you want to inflict guess-the-verb games on
>players, use another language. I won't play your game, but I won't stop
>you, either. Not every text adventure language has to be Inform.
'Guess the verb' is not the same as 'having many verbs available'.
It's only guess-the-verb if the correct verb is too obscure or if
there aren't enough logical alternatives which ought to work but
don't. If for example you need to type 'slay dragon' but 'kill dragon'
or 'hit dragon with sword' are not recognized, then you have a
gess-the-verb problem.
-------------
It's a bird...
It's a plane...
No, it's... Gadget?
-------------------
To send mail remove SPAMBLOCK from adress.
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
> On 10 Jan 2003 14:37:19 GMT, kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu (Mark
> 'Kamikaze' Hughes) wrote:
>> Not that I'd be playing the Iron Chef computer game, anyway, but
>>unusual actions like cooking can be done without playing guess-the-verb.
>> For a game where it's an irrelevant activity:
>>Kitchen
>>]use frying pan
>>You make scrambled eggs for breakfast. You're full now.
> But I didn't WANT to eat 'em!
<shrug> It's no different than in any other game. If the implementor
didn't bother to handle it, or just made it a one-line irrelevant gag
like the above, there's nothing you can do about it. Being able to type
"scramble eggs" instead of "use frying pan" won't change that.
>> Or the detailed version:
>>Kitchen
>>]put frying pan on stove
>>You put the frying pan on the stove.
>>]put egg in frying pan
>>You break the egg and pour it into the pan.
>>]use stove
>>The egg begins cooking.
>>]z
>>Time passes...
>>The egg is almost done.
>>]z
>>Time passes...
>>The egg is cooked. You turn the stove off. Smells good.
>>]use egg
>>Right out of the pan?
>>You totally sear your tongue. The pain is unbearable.
>>*** YOU HAVE DIED. ***
>>Your score is 0 out of 32767.
>
> Okay, you basically just took the piss out of the main puzzle of my
> game. I won't get mad. *sigh*. But I get the feeling you have a
> completely different idea of what *interactive* fiction is about then
> at least my own.
Heh! I was just describing my own breakfast... Okay, you got me, I
didn't really die, my tongue just hurt for a bit.
I don't see anything non-interactive about the above sequence. It's a
perfectly reasonable way to solve a puzzle (well, except for the ending,
but I used to crash the subway in Planetfall a lot, too). Finding the
egg and frying pan, and figuring out the right way to use them is the
puzzle. That could be fun. Trying to guess "scramble egg with the
frying pan on the stove" as the winning move is not fun.
Compare it to, say, the babelfish or tea/no tea puzzles in
_Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_. Neither required complex phrases,
that I recall. Just a stack of simple actions in the right order.
If, OTOH, you're saying that I'm not writing a gamebook where the
player gets to type one sentence per page of output philosophizing about
the meaning of life, you're right. I like my games to be more
interactive than most games currently called "interactive fiction" are.
I did write one in that style about 5 years ago, though I didn't quite
finish it to a releasable state. _A Secret Life_ doesn't seem to be on
my web site anywhere. Pity. It was a fairly short work, but
interesting. I'll have to see if any of my playtesters still have it.
But then, I don't claim to be writing "Interactive Fiction", as I
greatly dislike the term. I just write games, I'm not slave to any
genre. Right now I'm making a game that's a bit like Infocom and Scott
Adams games, that's all. If it helps, you could think of it as a
single-user MUD. SUD? Whatever.
> 'Guess the verb' is not the same as 'having many verbs available'.
> It's only guess-the-verb if the correct verb is too obscure or if
> there aren't enough logical alternatives which ought to work but
> don't. If for example you need to type 'slay dragon' but 'kill dragon'
> or 'hit dragon with sword' are not recognized, then you have a
> gess-the-verb problem.
I suppose. But why not just have one unambiguous way to do it? Would
you rather have the ability to type "slay dragon" (meaning "kill
dragon") or the extra *game* (more rooms, items, better descriptions)
that could be written in the time it took to handle "slay dragon"? Yes,
one verb alias won't take long... Dozens will. Special-case commands
will take a very long time, and require a lot of debugging. And once
you admit "slay" and "hit", you're in for an endless series of requests
to add "pop a cap in yo ass, dragon" and the like.
It's more work for no appreciable improvement in the interface.
In any event, I was just able to win cloak.xml. There's several
commands left to implement, and actors don't exist yet, but it's moving
along fast.
Jeffrey F Pack
> Fri, 10 Jan 2003 13:46:34 GMT, Richard Bos <r...@hoekstra-uitgeverij.nl>:
> > kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu (Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes) wrote:
> >> What verbs do people need? Give me a good justification for a verb I
> >> don't have, and I might add it.
> > Everything. I want "frobnicate" when I write a game that uses magic. I
> > want "sautee" when the game is set in a kitchen. Even more importantly,
> > I do not want to be stuck with _just_ "sautee", and "sautee" and
> > "stir-fry" _must_ be distinguishable.
>
> Bzzt. You presented no justification at all for those, and those are
> exactly the kind of guess-the-verb games I find completely awful and
> intolerable. The first time I reach one of those in a new game, I quit
> and delete the game. No joke. Magic words were cute in Adventure, 25
> years ago. Just like the first Maze of Twisty Passages was. But now
> it's *lame* and manipulative.
I think you're not understanding the proposed implementation. This is
guess-the-verb only if more pedestrian verbs like "cook" aren't
helpful. (Ideally, in this case COOK would return something like "How
do you want to prepare it? Stir-fry, sautee or what?" You could even
list the unorthodox verbs you've implemented, though this might spoil
the game.)
> Not that I'd be playing the Iron Chef computer game, anyway, but
> unusual actions like cooking can be done without playing guess-the-verb.
>
> For a game where it's an irrelevant activity:
> Kitchen
> ]use frying pan
> You make scrambled eggs for breakfast. You're full now.
This is the converse problem, where the game author has to read the
mind of the player. It's not the sort of problem that gets one stuck
(mainly because games that use "use" tend to only allow it when it's a
"correct" action, and also because these sort of games can be
brute-forced by using every object in every place), but it's still
annoying. How do you know that's what "use frying pan" meant?
> Or the detailed version:
> Kitchen
> ]put frying pan on stove
> You put the frying pan on the stove.
> ]put egg in frying pan
> You break the egg and pour it into the pan.
Eeeagh. I would *not* interpret PUT in this way, especially if the
egg can have other uses. (What if I was just trying to work around
inventory limits?)
> ]use stove
> The egg begins cooking.
This is borderline. Some people just don't like USE as an IF verb,
but I'd make it a synonym for TURN ON STOVE as there's really no other
reasonable interpretation of USE STOVE.
> ]z
> Time passes...
> The egg is almost done.
> ]z
> Time passes...
> The egg is cooked. You turn the stove off. Smells good.
I'd be a bit annoyed at automatically turning the stove off; seems the
whole point of the "almost done" message is to let one burn the egg.
(Besides, what would happen if they left the room with the stove on?
And if it's disallowed, what's the point of making the player WAIT
twice?)
> ]use egg
> Right out of the pan?
> You totally sear your tongue. The pain is unbearable.
> *** YOU HAVE DIED. ***
> Your score is 0 out of 32767.
This is unfair and mimesis-breaking (people don't generally instantly
die from a seared tongue), but has nothing to do with the detail
involved. If the egg needs to be cool, just ask "Right out of the
pan?" and be done with it.
There is an intermediate version, which tends to be the optimum. If
it's irrelevant, COOK EGG will probably suffice (or even
SCRAMBLE/FRY/POACH EGG as synonyms or alternatives). It should also
be noted that the tedium here is not related to the choice of verbs,
but rather to how many actions are required relative to how
interesting/rewarding the response to those actions is.
[And it should be further noted that frying-egg puzzles were one of
the more annoying recurring bits of the Unnkulian saga. IF's moved
on, I think.]
> >> Keep in mind that the interface needs to be portable across a wide
> >> range of devices, from PDAs to fully-graphical games. Most additional
> >> verbs are simulated with the "use" command.
> > Ewwww! Why not just include the "win game" command?
> You've got that the wrong way around. You want to add secret "win
> game" commands; if the player can guess your password from each room,
> the plot leaps forward.
Only in a badly designed game where (a) at most points in the game
there is exactly one action which will advance the game state toward
the conclusion, and (b) the action must be properly phrased to be
interpreted correctly.
[Insert stock ADRIFT rant here.]
> I want to use a small, consistent vocabulary so the player can
> concentrate on the setting, characters, and puzzles.
I get the impression of a Final Fantasy type game, where the
characters and setting are developed by the author and the player just
pushes buttons to watch the next part of the story. Oh, the buttons
pushed are probably more related to the story than in FF, but it's
still the author's story and not the player's. (Which is always the
case, I know, but it's the illusion that it isn't which makes the
difference.)
I can't think of any examples of good puzzles that involved a USE
OBJECT command (not counting Myst-likes where you interact directly
with an object), but my knowledge of graphical games is limited. The
only time I got stuck in the new-interface Sierra games was when I
needed arcade reflexes (click on the right pixel at the right time),
missed an item in the background, or couldn't find the proper trigger
to advance the game state.
> Like I said, though, if you want to inflict guess-the-verb games on
> players, use another language. I won't play your game, but I won't stop
> you, either. Not every text adventure language has to be Inform.
It sounds to me like what you're complaining about isn't
guess-the-verb, but guess-the-action.
Jeff
Adam Thornton
>a maze of twisty tags, all alike), but close.
Don't make me come beat you with my Entrenching Tool.
Adam
Jeffrey F Pack
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
Not at all:
]take entrenching tool
Taken.
]kill kamikaze with tool
You impale kamikaze with the entrenching tool.
He falls back with a surprised look on his face.
Lacking an author, the game cannot go on.
*** GAME OVER ***
Your score is: -100 out of 10
Shadow Wolf
news:slrnb1u3cn....@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu:
>
> All I'm interested in digging for in the group, at least for now, is
> things I may have missed, that are difficult or impossible to express in
> my vocabulary. I'd like things to stay focused on *that*. If you're
> not willing to cooperate in that, just mosey on past the thread.
>
>
Three Words: AIF :-)
No one wants to type "use my mouth on girl's mouth" instead of "kiss girl",
to give a PG example. (Not to mention the wide variety of other, non-PG
actions one may take in an AIF game).
--
Shadow Wolf
shado...@softhome.net
Stories at http://www.asstr.org/~Shadow_Wolf
David Welbourn
What about "set ITEM NUMBER"? The closest you've got to that is "ask
CREATURE SUBJECT".
-- David Welbourn
Kevin Forchione
news:slrnb1tqg9....@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu...
> I don't actively dislike very simple verbs like "eat", "drink", etc.,
> but those are at the top of a slippery slope leading down to Richard's
> nightmare example of "sautee" vs. "stir-fry".
>
> I plan to stay well away from that slope.
Isn't this more properly a concern for the game author, and not the system
designer? Game author's might abuse your system in countless many ways, and
probably will, but they also appreciate being given powerful tools that help
them to express themselves creatively.
Imagine, for instance, that I detested mazes in games and so set about to
create a system that inhibits the implementation of them. I have no idea
*how* I would go about doing this, but don't you think that as a systems
designer my efforts might be better spent elsewhere?
Now there are trade-offs for everything we do on a computer. Maybe there are
technical reasons for limiting the number of actions an author can employ,
maybe it's difficult to implement, or the processing is inefficient or it
hogs too many resources, or as you suggest, it's not portable across all the
platforms you want to install on. These are all valid design issues for not
implementing or restricting a feature, and every game system has them. These
kinds of decisions are understood and respected by designers, and author's
may grumble, but they'll bite their tongue for release 2.
From a practical perspective, to limit the extensibility of your system
based on flaws in puzzle design is a bit tricky. You run the risk of turning
people away, not for technical reasons, but on matters relating to your own
game-playing aesthetics. And if you do have a hot product on your hands, you
might find yourself inundated with requests for modifications that the
system architecture isn't able to accommodate except through kludges. That's
a chore.
A very interesting project, nonetheless.
--Kevin
Gadget
'Kamikaze' Hughes) wrote:
>
> Compare it to, say, the babelfish or tea/no tea puzzles in
>_Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_. Neither required complex phrases,
>that I recall. Just a stack of simple actions in the right order.
>
> If, OTOH, you're saying that I'm not writing a gamebook where the
>player gets to type one sentence per page of output philosophizing about
>the meaning of life, you're right. I like my games to be more
>interactive than most games currently called "interactive fiction" are.
>
Have you played *anything* from the archive? I mean: Come on...
Maybe I sound a bit paternalistic here, but you *really* need to get
off your high horse. It is your attitude which provokes the kind of
responses you are getting.
This is basic newsgroup etiquette. You can't walls in here and act
like you know it all. Hell, I've been in the IF groups for three years
and I still feel like a newbie half of the time...
And this isn't because the people of this group are repressive but
because there are people here who have written lots of great games,
libraries and, yes, IF authoring systems. They know their stuff. I
respect that.
> I did write one in that style about 5 years ago, though I didn't quite
>finish it to a releasable state. _A Secret Life_ doesn't seem to be on
>my web site anywhere. Pity. It was a fairly short work, but
>interesting. I'll have to see if any of my playtesters still have it.
>
must... resist... urge... to... add... sarcastic...comment...
> But then, I don't claim to be writing "Interactive Fiction", as I
>greatly dislike the term. I just write games, I'm not slave to any
>genre. Right now I'm making a game that's a bit like Infocom and Scott
>Adams games, that's all. If it helps, you could think of it as a
>single-user MUD. SUD? Whatever.
>
Oh hell... <sarcasm>Ah you're writing a game that has a two word
verb/noun parser with short, telegraph-like room descriptions that
still features full sentence decoding and book-quality prose, which is
based on hack and slash combat, stats and leveling up yet without any
other pesky competing players in the neighborhood? You must be a real
genius to be able to combine these three literal opposite forms of IF
in one heart-poundingly fun game. You really know what IF is
about.</sarcasm>
>> 'Guess the verb' is not the same as 'having many verbs available'.
>> It's only guess-the-verb if the correct verb is too obscure or if
>> there aren't enough logical alternatives which ought to work but
>> don't. If for example you need to type 'slay dragon' but 'kill dragon'
>> or 'hit dragon with sword' are not recognized, then you have a
>> gess-the-verb problem.
>
> I suppose. But why not just have one unambiguous way to do it? Would
>you rather have the ability to type "slay dragon" (meaning "kill
>dragon") or the extra *game* (more rooms, items, better descriptions)
>that could be written in the time it took to handle "slay dragon"? Yes,
>one verb alias won't take long... Dozens will. Special-case commands
>will take a very long time, and require a lot of debugging. And once
>you admit "slay" and "hit", you're in for an endless series of requests
>to add "pop a cap in yo ass, dragon" and the like.
*sigh* I'm getting tired of this. You don't *want* to understand. One
last attempt:
Playing IF requires some knowledge of the rules. Commands are bound by
these rules:
verb noun noun
is the basic structure of a command.
"plant the red tulip in the pot"
will work.
"Convince the gardener that he should put the red tulips in the pot in
the greenhouse before they die due to the cold front coming in"
does not. It is to complex. The player knows this. And the player also
isn't a moron either. If in the game he finds a cookbook with the
following recipe:
"Peel the unions and chop them up. Then saute the unions and add the
herbs."
He will subconsciously know that 'saute' is a command that will
probably work. This is good game design. Letting the player know what
is expected of him can relieve a lot of guess the verb (gtv) problems.
And if you thought a bit more about this, and actually played some
games in the archive, you would haven reached this conclusion
yourself.
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
> kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu (Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes) wrote in
> news:slrnb1u3cn....@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu:
>> All I'm interested in digging for in the group, at least for now, is
>> things I may have missed, that are difficult or impossible to express in
>> my vocabulary. I'd like things to stay focused on *that*. If you're
>> not willing to cooperate in that, just mosey on past the thread.
> Three Words: AIF :-)
How nice, an entirely new kink I was unaware of.
> No one wants to type "use my mouth on girl's mouth" instead of "kiss girl",
> to give a PG example. (Not to mention the wide variety of other, non-PG
> actions one may take in an AIF game).
]ask girl for kiss
]use rope on girl
]take scented oil
Okay, enough of that.
It'd also be entirely possible to describe those actions as skills,
though that is weird unless phrased right. Don't really see the appeal
of it, myself--porn's already plenty available, and if you're into
one-handed typing, netsex with real people is easy to get on the right
MUDs or IRC channels.
I will consider more social actions, though, when I get the actors up
and running.
Joey Narcotic
news:k7pu1vsnlnspq1k7v...@4ax.com...
> "Peel the unions and chop them up. Then saute the unions and add
the
> herbs."
I'm a socialist, myself.
Regards,
Joe
dgr...@cs.csbuak.edu
> The only reason I'm giving actors access to keywords at all is because
> I dislike menu-based conversation systems. I've been considering a
> middle ground, where keywords have to be "activated" by the actor's
> speech (probably with "hi" common to everyone), and a command will list
> most of the activated keywords for the player (can't list passwords,
> obviously).
How about like this?
> TALK TO OLD MAN
Hi, kid.
old man> NELSON
"What do you know about Lord Nelson?".
The old man replies, "He wasn't always a cruel man. When I was about your
age, he was quite a likable one. Of course, that was before the weird
things in the castle started up.".
old man> WEIRD
"What weird things?"
The old man replies, "I don't like to talk about those things.". He opens
a locket, peers inside, closes it, and quickly puts it away. A tear comes
to his eye.
old man> LOCKET
"What's in that locket?"
The old man ignores you and goes back to his beer.
--
David Griffith
Mark W
> Right, sure, but you're still telling the user they have to write
> angle-bracket-r-o-o-m-close-angle-bracket (or maybe, if you're using
> an xml editor, angle-bracket-r-o-tab-to-complete). By the time you
> finish explaining they need to download an xml editor, and learn how
> to use its auto-complete features, and learn what all the tags are and
> stuff, you could just have given them the Inform manual or the TADS
> manual or something.
>
> The programming logic issue is similar -- obviously you can represent any
> tree-like thing in XML, but there's no real benefit from the author's
> perspective in writing in XML over a more standard language -- the XML
> is way more verbose and requires about as much learning.
I'm sorry, did you miss the part where I mentioned XML Spy, and it having a
Graphical User Interface?
Take a look at these Screen Caps:
http://www.xmlspy.com/features_views.html
Now come back and talk to me about angle brackets.
Regards,
Mark
--
http://www.marktaw.com/
Gadget
*blush*
Gunther Schmidl
> I'm sorry, did you miss the part where I mentioned XML Spy, and it
> having a Graphical User Interface?
Did you mention it costs between $99 and $990, depending on feature set?
No thanks.
-- Gunther
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
> On 10 Jan 2003 20:57:39 GMT, kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu (Mark
> 'Kamikaze' Hughes) wrote:
>> Compare it to, say, the babelfish or tea/no tea puzzles in
>>_Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_. Neither required complex phrases,
>>that I recall. Just a stack of simple actions in the right order.
>> If, OTOH, you're saying that I'm not writing a gamebook where the
>>player gets to type one sentence per page of output philosophizing about
>>the meaning of life, you're right. I like my games to be more
>>interactive than most games currently called "interactive fiction" are.
> Have you played *anything* from the archive?
Yes, quite a lot in years past. Not much lately, as it increasingly
became less to my taste. More recently, I've mostly played commercial
games.
While I often mock the blandness of commercial games, there's a level
of respect for the player's free will and ease of play that I don't find
in most "modern" IF.
> I mean: Come on...
> Maybe I sound a bit paternalistic here, but you *really* need to get
> off your high horse. It is your attitude which provokes the kind of
> responses you are getting.
> This is basic newsgroup etiquette. You can't walls in here and act
> like you know it all. Hell, I've been in the IF groups for three years
> and I still feel like a newbie half of the time...
I've been playing text adventures for about 22 years now. Wrote my
first one about 21 years ago (in BASIC, and very lame, but my friends
enjoyed it), wrote many others since. I used to post in this group 8
years ago, up to the present. I've also written games in many other
genres, I'm not just a one-joke Johnny.
So yes, I can 'waltz' back in here and post and ask questions about my
own game, any time I want, because it's *MY FRIGGING GAME*. It's not
yours, Gadget. You wrote not a single bit in it, and have so far
contributed nothing positive to my design. All you've done so far is
fling shit at me. It remains to be seen if you can do anything else.
This is not your private club, and you are not some fearsome Cabal who
get to decide who lives and who dies. You're just one arrogant person
in a newsgroup. If you don't like my game, don't play it, don't read
about it, just ignore it.
I came back to r.a.i-f because my current game is a text adventure.
When I'm working on a roguelike game, I read and post in that group.
When I'm working on a MUD, there's a mailing list for that. And so on.
> And this isn't because the people of this group are repressive but
> because there are people here who have written lots of great games,
> libraries and, yes, IF authoring systems. They know their stuff. I
> respect that.
Telling me that I have to do what you say *IS* repressive. Or would
be, if I obeyed your orders, which I don't. I just laugh at you when
you try.
Respecting someone does not mean you have to do what they say.
Listen and consider, sure, but real people do what they want anyway.
There are people here who I do respect. You aren't one of them. Never
heard of you before. You have no cred with me, and you're sure not
earning any here.
>> But then, I don't claim to be writing "Interactive Fiction", as I
>>greatly dislike the term. I just write games, I'm not slave to any
>>genre. Right now I'm making a game that's a bit like Infocom and Scott
>>Adams games, that's all. If it helps, you could think of it as a
>>single-user MUD. SUD? Whatever.
> Oh hell... <sarcasm>Ah you're writing a game that has a two word
> verb/noun parser with short, telegraph-like room descriptions that
> still features full sentence decoding and book-quality prose, which is
> based on hack and slash combat, stats and leveling up yet without any
> other pesky competing players in the neighborhood? You must be a real
> genius to be able to combine these three literal opposite forms of IF
> in one heart-poundingly fun game. You really know what IF is
> about.</sarcasm>
I could waste time refuting that point-by-point, but I'll just say
that you have issues. Take them to your shrink, not to me.
As for "literal opposite forms of IF"... You have no clue. At all.
There is more to the world, and even to text adventures, than the exact
form of game you refer to as IF. Someone who wants to do something
different isn't a nutjob.
> *sigh* I'm getting tired of this. You don't *want* to understand. One
That's what I'd say about you. You have no desire to understand why
I'd want a simpler interface, or why I see the guess-the-verb game as
something to avoid, or why I think what you describe is guess-the-verb.
You find it easier to insult me than to consider my POV.
> "Peel the unions and chop them up. Then saute the unions and add the
> herbs."
> He will subconsciously know that 'saute' is a command that will
> probably work. This is good game design.
No. It's guess-the-verb, the epitome of bad game design. It was at
least mentioned in the text, which is more than most IF does, but it's
still "say the magic word and win a prize!"
It's the text equivalent of screen-scraping in graphical adventures.
"Didn't you find the switch? It's 2 pixels square, among the dust along
the floorboards in the dark closet. How could you miss it?"
> Letting the player know what
> is expected of him can relieve a lot of guess the verb (gtv) problems.
> And if you thought a bit more about this, and actually played some
> games in the archive, you would haven reached this conclusion
> yourself.
Gee, how nice of you not to just blurt out what you were thinking:
"ALL MUST THINK LIKE ME! You don't think like me, so you must be an
ignorant pigdog! Convert or die!"
If you want to apologize and act like an adult, that'd be nice. But
if you're going to continue to be unhelpful, Gadget, don't bother
posting. If I see anything else counterproductive from you, you go
right in the killfile.
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
> How about like this?
>> TALK TO OLD MAN
> Hi, kid.
> old man> NELSON
> "What do you know about Lord Nelson?".
> The old man replies, "He wasn't always a cruel man. When I was about your
> age, he was quite a likable one. Of course, that was before the weird
> things in the castle started up.".
> old man> WEIRD
> "What weird things?"
Yeah, that's basically what I had in mind, except in the current
design you'd have to "ask old man about nelson", etc.. That is
irritating having to type the same "ask old man about" over and over.
Your conversation mode would work better, as long as you can always exit
from it. Thanks!
Gadget
'Kamikaze' Hughes) wrote:
> So yes, I can 'waltz' back in here and post and ask questions about my
>own game, any time I want, because it's *MY FRIGGING GAME*. It's not
>yours, Gadget. You wrote not a single bit in it, and have so far
>contributed nothing positive to my design. All you've done so far is
>fling shit at me. It remains to be seen if you can do anything else.
>
> This is not your private club, and you are not some fearsome Cabal who
>get to decide who lives and who dies. You're just one arrogant person
>in a newsgroup. If you don't like my game, don't play it, don't read
>about it, just ignore it.
>
*sigh*
Dear Kamikaze,
Do you really think I care one bit what you do with your game? What I
responded to was the way you present yourself here. It's not
productive. It's not social. It's rude.
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
> On 11 Jan 2003 13:00:31 GMT, kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu (Mark
> 'Kamikaze' Hughes) wrote:
>> So yes, I can 'waltz' back in here and post and ask questions about my
>>own game, any time I want, because it's *MY FRIGGING GAME*. It's not
>>yours, Gadget. You wrote not a single bit in it, and have so far
>>contributed nothing positive to my design. All you've done so far is
>>fling shit at me. It remains to be seen if you can do anything else.
>> This is not your private club, and you are not some fearsome Cabal who
>>get to decide who lives and who dies. You're just one arrogant person
>>in a newsgroup. If you don't like my game, don't play it, don't read
>>about it, just ignore it.
> *sigh*
> Dear Kamikaze,
> Do you really think I care one bit what you do with your game? What I
> responded to was the way you present yourself here. It's not
> productive. It's not social. It's rude.
Ah, I see. Me asking for productive comments on my game (but without
the proper bowing and scraping to the great but little-known Gadget),
that's rude in Gadget-land. Hijacking a thread and demanding my
obeisance the way you did, that's polite in Gadget-land. Gotcha.
And it's just shocking that the thread becomes nonproductive and I get
surly and sarcastic when I get that kind of response, who'd ever expect
that?
But thank you for confirming that you'll never contribute any
productive comments. Your existence is of no further use to me.
*plonk*
L. Ross Raszewski
<kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu> wrote:
>
> Yes, quite a lot in years past. Not much lately, as it increasingly
>became less to my taste. More recently, I've mostly played commercial
>games.
>
> While I often mock the blandness of commercial games, there's a level
>of respect for the player's free will and ease of play that I don't find
>in most "modern" IF.
Could you please cite examples of "respect for the player's free will"
in commercial games that exceeds what's found in modern IF? I find
this a highly suspicious claim.
>
> No. It's guess-the-verb, the epitome of bad game design. It was at
>least mentioned in the text, which is more than most IF does, but it's
>still "say the magic word and win a prize!"
This statement reflects a fundamental difference of opinion over how
IF works.
You seem to think that all verbs beyond the Standard Set arew "guess
the verb puzzles" Aside from this being insane and wrong (and, fwiw,
it's only the very worst games which don't alert you to the existence
of new verbs by mentioning them in the game text), you neglect the
converse: you assume that if a game provides a non-standard verb, the
player will have to guess it. SUppose on the other hand, the player
thinks of a non-standard verb. If the game doesan't understand it,
then the player is disappointed.
You say 'sautee' is guess-the-verb, but isn't it far, far better than
'guess the phrase', bcause that's what you'd have to do if you needed
to make a subtle distinction in actions without new verbs. There waqs
a comp game several years ago with a combination lock which could only
be opened via '>UNLOCK SAFE WITH COMBINATION' -- requiring the
combination to be *in your hand* -- because the author was unwilling
to create a new verb.
>
>> Letting the player know what
>> is expected of him can relieve a lot of guess the verb (gtv) problems.
>> And if you thought a bit more about this, and actually played some
>> games in the archive, you would haven reached this conclusion
>> yourself.
>
> Gee, how nice of you not to just blurt out what you were thinking:
>"ALL MUST THINK LIKE ME! You don't think like me, so you must be an
>ignorant pigdog! Convert or die!"
No, you're just exceptionally rude, unwilling to listen to logical
arguments, and proposing a game design systme incapable of making
particularly good games, then insisting how wonderful it is.
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
> On 11 Jan 2003 13:00:31 GMT, Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
><kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu> wrote:
>> Yes, quite a lot in years past. Not much lately, as it increasingly
>>became less to my taste. More recently, I've mostly played commercial
>>games.
>> While I often mock the blandness of commercial games, there's a level
>>of respect for the player's free will and ease of play that I don't find
>>in most "modern" IF.
> Could you please cite examples of "respect for the player's free will"
> in commercial games that exceeds what's found in modern IF? I find
> this a highly suspicious claim.
Just to pick one example, _Planescape: Torment_. I did eventually
tire of the environment and the incessant combat, after 20-30 *HOURS* of
otherwise enjoyable gameplay (which I'd get from few IF games past or
present), but the game is extremely open to doing what you want and
making the moral choices you want.
Meanwhile, the last highly-praised IF game from the archive that I
played a year or so ago was essentially just guessing passwords to see
the next chunk of text from a novelist in the wrong field. I think I'll
pass on mentioning the title, since that's an entirely different
flamewar.
And I note that you don't dispute "ease of play"...
>> No. It's guess-the-verb, the epitome of bad game design. It was at
>>least mentioned in the text, which is more than most IF does, but it's
>>still "say the magic word and win a prize!"
> This statement reflects a fundamental difference of opinion over how
> IF works.
> You seem to think that all verbs beyond the Standard Set arew "guess
> the verb puzzles" Aside from this being insane and wrong
Stop. See, you're wondering why I'm maybe a bit hostile to
individuals like Gadget, and now you. That's it right there. Yes, I
have a different opinion than you... SO THAT MAKES ME INSANE AND WRONG,
according to obnoxious little fanboys like you.
I'm a perfect social mirror. I'm rude only when others are rude to
me. I've never spoken to you or done you wrong, but you call me "insane
and wrong" just for saying something you disagree with.
If you'd made a logical and polite argument, I'd have responded to it
in a pleasant manner, as I have to other polite posters here. But you
insulted me, so I'll give you only:
*plonk*
Mark W
news:10422832...@news.liwest.at:
>> I'm sorry, did you miss the part where I mentioned XML Spy, and it
>> having a Graphical User Interface?
>
> Did you mention it costs between $99 and $990, depending on feature set?
Oh sorry, I forgot about that, I was using it at work... It is silly to use
a $100 software package to create something like IF.
Adam Thornton
Actually, in these parts, our convention for that phrase is, "FUCK YOU!
YOU'RE IN MY KILLFILE! NEXT!"
HTH! HAND!
Adam
Joe Mason
> Stop. See, you're wondering why I'm maybe a bit hostile to
> individuals like Gadget, and now you. That's it right there. Yes, I
> have a different opinion than you... SO THAT MAKES ME INSANE AND WRONG,
> according to obnoxious little fanboys like you.
Well, you are insane and wrong. What mystifies me is why everybody
keeps going on about it. It's a perfectly harmless form of insanity,
unlike that of certain other people who I hope don't return here. (I
bring them up only to remind everyone how trivial this is on the list of
things to get uptight over.)
Joe
Ally
kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu (Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes) wrote in
news:slrnb1u3cn....@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu:
> The game author could have anything
> happen when you "eat apple"; it could as easily blow up the planet as
> stop your hunger. As a player, you trust that the author will do
> something sane, and will get irritated if the author violates that
> trust. Why should that change just because the action is more
> general? And why would that give the player any kind of
> "satisfaction"?
I find it more satisfying to play a game that actually understands what
I'm talking about and reacts accordingly, by, say, letting me not only
eat, but also peel, wash, smell the apple, or by using (heh) the apple
in an altogether different, nonapplish fashion.
Having to perform not-so-standard actions by finding the right
combination of skills or objects to use the object on (or to use on the
object) sort of undermines the promise (or beauty) of a language-based
interface.
I'd make that an entirely graphical interface, with
guessing-the-player's-mind as an integral (and welcome) aspect of the
game design. That's actually something I've been thinking about for a
while, kinda hoping it might facilitate the creation of faster-moving,
more dramatic prose-outputting games, closer perhaps to explorable
stories with not so "obedient" protagonists.
But that's just something from my vapourware list; I'm not at all
suggesting you do as I say.
> If the interface makes getting things done difficult, as in
> guess-the-verb games, or by screen-scraping in a graphics adventure,
> then that's just a lousy interface. Otherwise, the interface ought to
> be invisible.
But _no one_ wants their game to be a "guess-the-verb game". Ideally,
the point of "verb-wanking" is not to add yet another single-use
command, but to allow players to phrase the same action in different
ways so as to let them use the phrasing that comes natural to them.
David Ploog
Newsbeitrag: slrnb217j9.1...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu...
> Sat, 11 Jan 2003 20:06:36 GMT, L. Ross Raszewski <lrasz...@loyola.edu>:
> > You seem to think that all verbs beyond the Standard Set arew "guess
> > the verb puzzles" Aside from this being insane and wrong >
> Stop. See, you're wondering why I'm maybe a bit hostile to
> individuals like Gadget, and now you. That's it right there. Yes, I
> have a different opinion than you... SO THAT MAKES ME INSANE AND WRONG,
> according to obnoxious little fanboys like you.
>
> I'm a perfect social mirror. I'm rude only when others are rude to
> me. I've never spoken to you or done you wrong, but you call me "insane
> and wrong" just for saying something you disagree with.
>
> If you'd made a logical and polite argument, I'd have responded to it
> in a pleasant manner, as I have to other polite posters here. But you
> insulted me, so I'll give you only:
>
> *plonk*
>
Yes, that's the right reaction. Just *plonk* anybody who has
a different opinion than you and whom you do - you say so
yourself - never met before and don't know anything about.
And, in case, it escaped you:
He didn't say you were insane (he simply stated - in an
exaggerated way - that your definition of gtv-puzzles is a
bit too drastic. If this insults you, then don't complain
that others don't understand your "slightly sarcastic
undertone"), though by your reaction to this I might jump to
the conclusion that you are, but again I don't know you and
so, to me you seem just a little overenthousiastic about a
new program of yours, which is of course totally valid and
human, if you wouldn't go on about it insulting everybody who
doesn't like it as old-fashioned and the like.
We don't know your program, so we can only judge it by what
you told us about, and to our conservative minds it sounds
as if it were lacking some details that are generally
approved as necessary to produce good IF.
You want to make a totally different kind of games because
you don't like what is already there, which is in itself
totally comprehensible and I understand that you are
convinced that Aiee! is totally indispensable (otherwise, you
wouldn't put as much effort in it as you do) but please don't run around
saying that everything else ever produced is rubbish.
David
PS: When I first read about your project, I was curious and
eager to try it out, but after you presented yourself here in
such an insocial manner (putting words in people's mouths
that they never even suggested, and attacking people who say
that they respect you and your work), I don't think that I'll
have a lot of trouble deciding whether I'll "use" it or not.
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
>> me. I've never spoken to you or done you wrong, but you call me "insane
>> and wrong" just for saying something you disagree with.
>> If you'd made a logical and polite argument, I'd have responded to it
>> in a pleasant manner, as I have to other polite posters here. But you
>> insulted me, so I'll give you only:
>> *plonk*
> Yes, that's the right reaction. Just *plonk* anybody who has
> a different opinion than you and whom you do - you say so
> yourself - never met before and don't know anything about.
Where the devil do you get that? I plonked him for giving me grief
over *MY* different opinion, stated in a thread about *MY* game engine.
I didn't hunt that guy down and demand answers from him. All I asked
for in the beginning was some productive feedback, and openly stated
that if you don't like what I'm trying to do, there are many systems
already available.
I don't care if someone has a different opinion. Feel free to play
whatever games you want. I just don't want to be insulted for my
preferences, or for choosing to play or design a different game. Do you
understand that?
> new program of yours, which is of course totally valid and
> human, if you wouldn't go on about it insulting everybody who
> doesn't like it as old-fashioned and the like.
I've *never* called anyone that, possibly never in my life. That's a
complete and utter fabrication. I just stated my distaste for a certain
kind of puzzle. You think the common forms of it aren't a problem;
fine, there are plenty of languages and adventures which support that.
Play them if you want.
Expecting me to violate my aesthetic tastes and some major design
goals just because it's in common use, though, is ludicrous.
> convinced that Aiee! is totally indispensable (otherwise, you
> wouldn't put as much effort in it as you do) but please don't run around
> saying that everything else ever produced is rubbish.
I never have. Just said it wasn't to my taste. Again, this is your
perception problem.
> PS: When I first read about your project, I was curious and
> eager to try it out, but after you presented yourself here in
> such an insocial manner (putting words in people's mouths
> that they never even suggested, and attacking people who say
> that they respect you and your work)
Oh, bitter irony. Whose mouth is getting stuffed with whose words?
In any case, enough. I do not care for further discussion of the
guess-the-verb/use problem. I've seen what passes for the best
arguments for it, and I am unmoved. You want to discuss it with each
other, feel free, but please start a new thread if you do.
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
> I'd make that an entirely graphical interface, with
> guessing-the-player's-mind as an integral (and welcome) aspect of the
> game design. That's actually something I've been thinking about for a
> while, kinda hoping it might facilitate the creation of faster-moving,
> more dramatic prose-outputting games, closer perhaps to explorable
> stories with not so "obedient" protagonists.
> But that's just something from my vapourware list; I'm not at all
> suggesting you do as I say.
Actually, working across a wide range of devices is one of the major
design goals. I intend to build a fully-graphical iconic client, a
lightly-graphical text client, a line-oriented ASCII client, and a
minimal-typing PalmOS client.
Right now, I have the parser/interpreter close to beta, and the
least-effort ASCII client is done. The adventure generator, the real
driver of Aiee!'s development, is a long way from complete, I'm still
designing and researching that, though I have a bit of prototype code
that does something interesting. Adding more clients should happen over
the next few months.
So maybe March for the iconic client, +/- a month depending on my
interest.
> But _no one_ wants their game to be a "guess-the-verb game". Ideally,
> the point of "verb-wanking" is not to add yet another single-use
> command, but to allow players to phrase the same action in different
> ways so as to let them use the phrasing that comes natural to them.
I used to agree with that position. And spent far too much time
trying to do it. Every time you add a command, you have to consider how
it'll interact with every object in the game. There were a couple of
(then fairly recent) r.a.i-f articles from Dave Baggett we had printed
out and hung on the wall, which really said everything about the
problem:
<http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=29mhumINNnsc%40life.ai.mit.edu>
<http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=29s2d9INNmak%40life.ai.mit.edu>
But I was put off IF for a while by my group IF development
experience, and a period where I played too many IF games that were
abusive of guess-the-verb puzzles. So I started playing a lot more
computer and console RPGs, which I'd mostly avoided for the best part of
a decade...
CRPGs usually have very simple interfaces. At first, it irritated my
IF- and roguelike-trained habits not having "eat", "drink", etc., just
an item list with Use, Equip, etc... No "pull lever", you just stand in
front of it and hit X or SPACE... But it works. It's extremely
natural, and the interface just becomes invisible. You concentrate only
on the world, and the story. The better ones gave you enough story
branches and free will to not feel like rail-shooters, too.
With most text adventures, I'm sucked right out of the game and back
to my keyboard, fighting with the parser to get what I want expressed.
That basically never happens to me with console games.
I don't want to make a "console text adventure", but the simpler
interface principle is a permanent part of my game design aesthetics
now.
Tom Waddington
> If you *like* making guess-the-verb games, other languages exist
> already.
Of course, if you /don't/ like making use-the-verb-that-makes-sense
games (I don't think most people here mean the same thing by
"guess-the-verb" as you), other languages exist already, and they're
the same languages.
While Inform, for example, can cater for both nothing-but-"use" games
and more complex parsers (and, for that matter, graphical text
adventures, CYOA games, zmachine abuses and probably several more
varieties that I've forgotten), anyone using your system is limited
to the nothing-but-"use" variety.
Also:
> <if><test var="damage" op="lt">2</test>
> <then>
> <score value="1"/>
> <text>The message, neatly marked in the sawdust, reads...\n\n
> \t*** You have won ***\n</text>
> </then>
> <else>
> <text>The message has been carelessly trampled, making it
> difficult to read. You can just distinguish the
> ords...\n\n\t*** You have lost ***\n</text>
> </else>
> </if>
> I could have renamed <if> to pretend it was less programmerish, but
> why? It still boils down to "if foo then bar else quux"
Precisely the point on which all such "no programming" programming
systems fall down. As soon as you want to do anything more
complicated that link a few rooms together, you have to know how to
program. For my money, wrapping the components of an if statement in
XML tags makes it more difficult to understand, not less.
"The message has been carelessly trampled" indeed.
--
Tom Waddington
Ally
<snip>
> Every time you add a command, you have to consider how
> it'll interact with every object in the game.
Well... yes and no. ...
> There were a couple of
> (then fairly recent) r.a.i-f articles from Dave Baggett we had printed
> out and hung on the wall, which really said everything about the
> problem:
> <http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=29mhumINNnsc%40life.ai.mit.edu>
> <http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=29s2d9INNmak%40life.ai.mit.edu>
... In Dave Baggett's case ("burn outhouse"), he could have implemented
"<wood|rock|paper|...>Material" mix-in classes to add "burn", "break",
"tear", "cut", ... behaviour to each and every object as appropriate.
Any object inside the outhouse would in turn know if it's supposed to
turn into ashes, get charred, evaporate, etc.
Then again, fire is exceptionally tricky to handle properly (even for
Real Programmers, I suppose), and special objects will still require
special behaviour, not to mention NPCs' reactions to the PC's pyromania,
etc.; but _some_ degree of abstraction and/or simulationism _might_ help
with that combinatory explosion thing.
<snip>
> CRPGs usually have very simple interfaces. At first, it irritated
> my
> IF- and roguelike-trained habits not having "eat", "drink", etc., just
> an item list with Use, Equip, etc... No "pull lever", you just stand
> in front of it and hit X or SPACE... But it works. It's extremely
> natural, and the interface just becomes invisible. You concentrate
> only on the world, and the story. The better ones gave you enough
> story branches and free will to not feel like rail-shooters, too.
>
> With most text adventures, I'm sucked right out of the game and back
> to my keyboard, fighting with the parser to get what I want expressed.
> That basically never happens to me with console games.
I have problems solving even the simplest puzzles, but not usually
problems expressing myself. Give me a decent parser, decent feedback as
to why something I tried didn't work, and enough freedom of action, and
I won't have to "guess the verb/phrase".
> I don't want to make a "console text adventure", but the simpler
> interface principle is a permanent part of my game design aesthetics
> now.
I do think console RPGs can be fun, and fun in part because of their
simple interface (though I've never really played any, don't like their
style much, and don't own any consoles besides 2600/7800s), I'm just not
sure it'll be all that, uhm, impressive when combined with something
that behaves like plain text IF in most other ways. I hope so. But that
wouldn't mean a good parser is an _inferior_ interface. Not to me, that
is...
~Ally
Richard Bos
> Fri, 10 Jan 2003 13:46:34 GMT, Richard Bos <r...@hoekstra-uitgeverij.nl>:
> > kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu (Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes) wrote:
> >> What verbs do people need? Give me a good justification for a verb I
> >> don't have, and I might add it.
> > Everything. I want "frobnicate" when I write a game that uses magic. I
> > want "sautee" when the game is set in a kitchen. Even more importantly,
> > I do not want to be stuck with _just_ "sautee", and "sautee" and
> > "stir-fry" _must_ be distinguishable.
>
> Bzzt. You presented no justification at all for those,
Well, as a game author I'd say that "because I want them" is
justification enough. However, if you want more justification:
In game one, the protagonist is a wizard. He has a spellbook, so he
won't have to guess-the-spellverb; the real trick is in deciding which
spell to use where. USE SPELLBOOK won't do, because FROTZ DOG and
FRIBBLE DOG are going to have spectacularly different results. Sure, you
could have CAST FROTZ ON DOG instead... except, oops, CAST is not an
Officially Sanctioned Verb. Guess that'll have to be USE FROTZ ON DOG.
Only, spells come on scrolls as well as in spellbooks, and they can be
inserted in the spellbook (it's a binder kind of system). Now, what does
USE FONKOZ ON SPELLBOOK do? Does it Fonkoz the spellbook, or does it put
the Fonkoz scroll in the spellbook? And how do I perform the
alternative?
In game two, you are a student-wannabe. To impress your housemates, you
have to be able to cook a Stir-fried Mumble. Unfortunately, you don't
have a magic stove, and USE STOVE ON LEFTOVERS will create a Sticky Mess
instead. You'll have to do some research on the 'web (try it!), and come
up with a real Stir-Fried Mumble to convince your pals to let you live
with them. You don't want to use the verb "cook" or "sautee"; those will
give you a different dish altogether. No, you'll have to use "stir-fry".
Of course, you do have sufficient synonyms; for example, the verb "wok"
will work just as well.
> and those are
> exactly the kind of guess-the-verb games I find completely awful and
> intolerable.
Yes; I see you prefer guess-the-noun puzzles.
> The first time I reach one of those in a new game, I quit
> and delete the game. No joke.
Your loss, not mine. Guess you don't play a lot of IF these days; "Pick
up the phone booth and die" is too complex for your specifications.
> For a game where it's an irrelevant activity:
> Kitchen
> ]use frying pan
> You make scrambled eggs for breakfast. You're full now.
Oops... I wanted to make an omelet instead, and I didn't want to eat it
myself; I wanted to give it to my neighbour. Guess I should have typed
] use frying pan and eggs on omelet recipe and neighbour
instead...
> >> Keep in mind that the interface needs to be portable across a wide
> >> range of devices, from PDAs to fully-graphical games. Most additional
> >> verbs are simulated with the "use" command.
> > Ewwww! Why not just include the "win game" command?
>
> You've got that the wrong way around. You want to add secret "win
> game" commands; if the player can guess your password from each room,
> the plot leaps forward.
No, you've got the wrong impression. I don't want the player to _guess_
which action to take; I want him to _deduce_ it. Once the correct idea
has entered the player's brain, the verb to use should either be obvious
or should be deducible from the rest of the game.
Guess-the-verb puzzles only occur if the verb is _not_ clued, or if the
selection of them is so limited in scope that you need _exactly_ the
synonym the programmer thought of. The solution for this is being able,
as a game writer, to create more synonyms for my rarer verbs, _not_ to
restrict the verbs I use to only the obvious ones.
> I want to use a small, consistent vocabulary so
> the player can concentrate on the setting, characters, and puzzles.
YM apply the "USE ITEM" hammer on every single object he finds, whether
or not they are nails, right?
Sure, go ahead, create your system. Just don't be surprised if not all
that many people want to write games in it - or play games written in
it.
Richard
Quintin Stone
> In any case, enough. I do not care for further discussion of the
> guess-the-verb/use problem. I've seen what passes for the best
> arguments for it, and I am unmoved. You want to discuss it with each
> other, feel free, but please start a new thread if you do.
I think there are two main problems that stirred up this firestorm.
First, as you've indicated a couple of times, this system is intended also
for graphical games (correct me if I'm wrong) where a simpler command
parser is more appropriate. I don't consider RAIF to be entrenched in
terms of game language, but it is pretty obvious that it's almost
exclusively about pure text adventures. And in my mind, it seems natural
that the people who are still enamored with text adventures after all this
time are the type who were in favor of game parsers moving from rigide
minimal verb parsers to the numerous verb complex parsers of today. So it
doesn't come as much of a surprise to me to see that a lot of people here
view verb-pruning as a step backwards.
Second, this is a collection of game authors who are used to writing
adventures on systems created by other people. It's not based on any sort
of scientific poll, but I'd guess that quite a few people here, a large
minority if not a majority, have felt the need to add their own verbs to
the already large vocabulary presented by Inform, TADS, Hugo, etc. Your
system is going in a different direction though, which is fine. Don't
underestimate the draw of customizability, is my advice. If this system
is intended only for your own games, then yours is the only opinion that
matters. However, if you want this to appeal to other developers, the
rigid nature might be a turn off. It's always disheartening to create
something for public consumption and then get a disappointing turn-out.
In my experience, anyway.
I don't know, these are just my thoughts on the matter.
/====================================================================\
|| Quintin Stone O- > "You speak of necessary evil? One ||
|| Weapons Master & Coder < of those necessities is that if ||
|| Rebel Programmers Society > innocents must suffer, the guilty must ||
|| st...@rps.net < suffer more." -- Mackenzie Calhoun ||
|| http://www.rps.net/ > "Once Burned" by Peter David ||
\====================================================================/
dgr...@cs.csbuak.edu
>> How about like this?
>>> TALK TO OLD MAN
>> Hi, kid.
>> old man> NELSON
>> "What do you know about Lord Nelson?".
>> The old man replies, "He wasn't always a cruel man. When I was about your
>> age, he was quite a likable one. Of course, that was before the weird
>> things in the castle started up.".
>> old man> WEIRD
>> "What weird things?"
> [...]
> Yeah, that's basically what I had in mind, except in the current
> design you'd have to "ask old man about nelson", etc.. That is
> irritating having to type the same "ask old man about" over and over.
> Your conversation mode would work better, as long as you can always exit
> from it. Thanks!
Of course you can exit from it with "BYE" or something similar.
--
David Griffith
Jeffrey F Pack
> > [...]
This is similar to what Ultima 4-6 did for conversations, though the
responses were usually rather short (most likely because the text
appeared in a small window on the corner of the screen).
The other keyword-based technique that's used in IF is to have a
non-exclusive "talk mode" with the usual abbreviations shortened.
Usually this takes the form of TALK TO NPC to set which NPC you're
addressing, then A SUBJECT or T SUBJECT to ask/tell NPC about SUBJECT.
The nice thing about this approach is that the player doesn't have to
use BYE to get back to interacting with the rest of the game world,
and doesn't have to keep track of which mode he/she is in.
Like all keyword-based conversation, though, it has the drawback of
being either lopsided (See the actor's lines in the play in Ultima 7)
or putting words in the player's mouth; it also can turn into
guess-the-topic, which I find far more difficult than guess-the-action.
Jeff
Ryan Schipper
> get to decide who lives and who dies.
He raises a good point... it would be pretty cool to have a cabal.
Skip
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
> This is similar to what Ultima 4-6 did for conversations, though the
> responses were usually rather short (most likely because the text
> appeared in a small window on the corner of the screen).
Right. No reason not to use as much as a screen of text in a real IF
system (though that long an infodump could bore the player, but that's
up to the author).
> Like all keyword-based conversation, though, it has the drawback of
> being either lopsided (See the actor's lines in the play in Ultima 7)
> or putting words in the player's mouth; it also can turn into
> guess-the-topic, which I find far more difficult than guess-the-action.
To get around that, I'm going to track activated words unless the
adventure marks them as "invisible", so you can list them with a hint
(the number of hints you used is reported at the end of the game, and
I'm wavering between reducing the score by your hints or not).
Jeffrey F Pack
> 13 Jan 2003 18:27:43 -0500, Jeffrey F Pack <jf...@ciao.cc.columbia.edu>:
> > Like all keyword-based conversation, though, it has the drawback of
> > being either lopsided (See the actor's lines in the play in Ultima 7)
> > or putting words in the player's mouth; it also can turn into
> > guess-the-topic, which I find far more difficult than guess-the-action.
>
> To get around that, I'm going to track activated words unless the
> adventure marks them as "invisible", so you can list them with a hint
> (the number of hints you used is reported at the end of the game, and
> I'm wavering between reducing the score by your hints or not).
I think Ultima 6 did that too, at least in VGA mode. What I meant,
though, is that it's not as immersive a dialogue when one side is
giving page-long infodumps and the other is grunting one-word
responses. But the alternative is to expand those short queries into
full sentences, which can also break immersion if the tone of the
expansion isn't what the player expected/wanted. (Perhaps allowing
the player to choose tone as well as query subject? Though this must
be well-designed or it's yet another guessing game or
exhaust-the-possibilities endeavor.)
Jeff
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
> I think Ultima 6 did that too, at least in VGA mode. What I meant,
> though, is that it's not as immersive a dialogue when one side is
> giving page-long infodumps and the other is grunting one-word
> responses. But the alternative is to expand those short queries into
> full sentences, which can also break immersion if the tone of the
> expansion isn't what the player expected/wanted. (Perhaps allowing
> the player to choose tone as well as query subject? Though this must
> be well-designed or it's yet another guessing game or
> exhaust-the-possibilities endeavor.)
It's a little odd just using one-word responses, but it can be left up
to the adventure author to put words in the player's mouth or not. I
don't want to deal with menus of response choices, those tend to give
away too much.
One nice part of using keyword activation is that you can also
de-activate a word, so a conversation isn't just exhausting the
possibilities. If you piss someone off, you shouldn't get to see the
pleasant branches unless you can placate them (re-activating the
keywords).
Jaap van der Velde
'Kamikaze' Hughes) wrote:
>> No one wants to type "use my mouth on girl's mouth" instead of "kiss girl",
>> to give a PG example. (Not to mention the wide variety of other, non-PG
>> actions one may take in an AIF game).
>
>]ask girl for kiss
Great idea, all you'd really need in a good game would be some sort
of sidekick which moves around with you (see thread elsewhere on
how to accomplish this) and just ask him stuff you need done:
> ask bob to stir-fry eggs in butter
Bob stir-fries the eggs in the butter.
> ask bob to sautee onions
Bob sautees the onions in oil.
> ask bob to discuss existentialism with Kierkegaard
Bob learns a lot about it.
> ask bob to debate existentialism with Kierkegaard
Bob formulates a good case against it, but is bested by Kierkegaard's
superb reasoning and zealous defense of it.
So there.
Please don't insult me too hard. I'm just a cabal-wannabe-member
looking for a trench to join the party.
BTW: If you're still reading, I think this group is very skeptical
at times, but this has never seemed to me to be out of conservativism.
I think the critical thinking and sincere attention for all problems
and opinion is what makers this group stand out in a positive way.
And the sense of wit of some members, well... Either you like it
or you don't.
Grtz,
JAAP.
Jaap van der Velde
Velde) wrote some stuff and inadvertantly changed the subject for
which he is terribly sorry.
JAAP.
Neil Cerutti
> Just so you don't come up with further fantasy flaws, the current
> command list is:
I believe your system is unsuitable, as it contains *too many* verbs.
> a[sk] CREATURE SUBJECT Ask CREATURE about SUBJECT
Just SUBJECT ought to be enough in a non-psychotic game. Only the most
annoying games ever have more than one creature in the room at once.
If that happens, I quit posthaste.
> c[lose] ITEM Close ITEM
A decent game should not force me to do mundane, boring tasks like
closing the ITEM. If it needs to be closed, it should not be open.
I hate games that make me close ITEMS; I delete them. Authoring
Systems should not permit abuse of this sort.
> d[rop] ITEM Drop ITEM
That's another thing. One of the most boring and overdone puzzles
in the history of gaming is: inventory management. Please please please
just let the darn game proceed, and give the player the necessary items.
> g[o] DIR Go DIR (n|ne|e|se|s|sw|w|nw|u|d)
Surely DIR alone, suffices? Besides, the only games in recent memory
that were any good were set in one room. In order to disallow the abuse
of ridiculously confusing maps, I think a system should enforce one location
only.
> h[int] Hint about this room (Special)
Who needs hints in a game with no verbs?
> help Help about AIEE (Special)
A command to help AIEE might be useful, but so far, it's
not had any effect.
> i[nv] Inventory (Special)
See [d]rop.
> k[ill] CREATURE ITEM Kill CREATURE with ITEM
That's silly. If I've got a sword, any decent game will automatically
kill everything and everyone I meet.
> l[ook] [TARGET] Look at room or TARGET (item or creature)
If enough verbs are removed, there will be no necessity of interacting
with the environment, so no need to look at it either. However, in
the interest of tradition, it's probably necessary for it to be
a synonym for "QUIT".
> log Activates or deactivates logging (Special)
I don't like logging games. Only The Space Under the Window included
any decent logging scenes, and even then, they had to be inferred.
> o[pen] ITEM Open ITEM
See [c]lose.
> p[ut] ITEM1 ITEM2 Put ITEM1 in ITEM2
This is just a fancy synonym for drop. If I don't need to drop things
(and why should I?) putting things in other things makes no sense either.
I suppose it's necessary for AIF, but in real games, no way. I
gathered all the games featuring PUT together in a pile, doused them
with spam oil, and burned them.
> quit Quit game (Special)
This is the only command I'm likely to need.
> r[emove] ITEM1 ITEM2 Remove ITEM1 from ITEM2
Sure, TAKE, if it existed, should be enough?
However, it could be changed to automatically delete
the current game. That would save me a lot of time.
> restart Erases current game and restarts it (Special)
I like the first part. But how can restart after the game is erased?
> restore Restore game from savefile (Special)
What savefile?
> save Save game to savefile (Special)
Oh.
> score Report your current score (Special)
Kamikaze: 0 Authors: 0 Neil: 0
> t[ake] ITEM Take ITEM
See d[rop].
> u[se] ITEM [TARGET] Use ITEM, optionally on TARGET (item or creature)
Once the verb list is pared down to only one, even that one
verb is obviated in preference to just typing object names.
> version Reports the version of AIEE (Special)
The version number of a system has never impacted my enjoyment of
anything. Just print it in the game BANNER, and be done with it.
> w[ear/ield] ITEM Wear/Wield or Take off ITEM
What about clothing that can be used as a weapon? Like spike-heeled shoes.
> Direct and indirect objects are usually separated by prepositions.
What a waste of resources. I don't want to have to guess the preposition.
> If anyone has useful suggestions of missing commands, and can do so
> politely and with an actual explanation of what they're good for and why
> they can't be done some simpler way, I would still like to hear them.
> Otherwise, I'll consider the question closed.
]c QUESTION
--
Neil Cerutti <cer...@trans-video.net>
Adam Thornton
Neil Cerutti <cer...@trans-video.net> wrote:
>Just SUBJECT ought to be enough in a non-psychotic game. Only the most
>annoying games ever have more than one creature in the room at once.
>If that happens, I quit posthaste.
I only understood you as far as wanting to quit.
Adam
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
> On 11 Jan 2003 01:14:27 GMT, kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu (Mark
> 'Kamikaze' Hughes) wrote:
>>]ask girl for kiss
> Great idea, all you'd really need in a good game would be some sort
> of sidekick which moves around with you (see thread elsewhere on
> how to accomplish this) and just ask him stuff you need done:
>> ask bob to debate existentialism with Kierkegaard
> Bob formulates a good case against it, but is bested by Kierkegaard's
> superb reasoning and zealous defense of it.
Yes, I was aware of that possibility... Though responding only to
such a long keyword would be a particularly cruel trick, and you can't
do much parsing in the world language.
You can accomplish much the same thing by using a bunch of skills or
items.
Aiee!'s interface makes it more difficult to annoy the player, not
impossible. There's no way to stop a determinedly obnoxious adventure
author, except by completely crippling it.
L. Ross Raszewski
<kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu> wrote:
> Aiee!'s interface makes it more difficult to annoy the player, not
>impossible. There's no way to stop a determinedly obnoxious adventure
>author, except by completely crippling it.
>
Have you gotten *any* players to back you up on this? AFAICT, it looks
like Aiee! makes it impossible *not* to annoy the player.
Sicher
www.xmlmind.com. You may find their XXE xml editor good. I use it on a
daily basis with quite large documents...
/Mikael