I would like to know if there are available any system that can be used to create IF using asian languages, eg Chinese, even if it is just a miminal system, without all the linguistic parsing except for simple pattern matching. I understand there are some that is unicode, and so can display unicode text, but what about actions?
On Nov 28, 4:54 am, sloke <loke...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I would like to know if there are available any system that can be > used to create IF using asian languages, eg Chinese, even if it is > just a miminal system, without all the linguistic parsing except for > simple pattern matching.
Not that I know of. I am pretty sure there is no Chinese IF authoring tool, the situation for other languages is less clear to me.
That said, TADS3 is designed with Unicode in mind, and I've played with the idea of writing a Chinese TADS3 standard library. It seems a lot of work, but not impossible.
> I understand there are some that is unicode, > and so can display unicode text, but what about actions?
For Chinese, the displaying part is actually not simple. As for action commands, if we are not talking about complicated command parsing, I don't see how that is particularly difficult or different from English.
> On Nov 28, 4:54 am, sloke <loke...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I would like to know if there are available any system that can be > > used to create IF using asian languages, eg Chinese, even if it is > > just a miminal system, without all the linguistic parsing except for > > simple pattern matching.
> Not that I know of. I am pretty sure there is no Chinese IF authoring > tool, the situation for other languages is less clear to me.
> That said, TADS3 is designed with Unicode in mind, and I've played > with the idea of writing a Chinese TADS3 standard library. It seems a > lot of work, but not impossible.
> > I understand there are some that is unicode, > > and so can display unicode text, but what about actions?
> For Chinese, the displaying part is actually not simple. As for > action commands, if we are not talking about complicated command > parsing, I don't see how that is particularly difficult or different > from English.
I'm guessing that it didn't catch on in China because when IF was popular very few Chinese people had home computers. I've done research into Korean IF and I can tell you definitively there is none whatsoever. There are some Korean IF fan sites but they're dedicated to English-language games.
It shouldn't really be any harder to write an Asian-language parser than a European-language one. But I think it would be pretty hard to gain traction with potential audiences.
I'm working on an authoring system, www.CircumReality.com that should be able to handle Asian, barring a few bugs (which I'm willing to fix) and some work on word-breaking for the text-to-speech synthesis.
Would word breaking be necessary for a command parser?
> I would like to know if there are available any system that can be > used to create IF using asian languages, eg Chinese, even if it is > just a miminal system, without all the linguistic parsing except for > simple pattern matching. I understand there are some that is unicode, > and so can display unicode text, but what about actions?
On Dec 1, 7:55 am, Lunas Specto <lunasspe...@mailbolt.com> wrote:
> Can Inform 6 be modified to make games in Asian languages the same way > it has been modified to make games in various European languages.
As far as I know, the Z-machine backend can't handle Asian languages because it has a very small fixed-size character set. The Glulx backend probably can, but I don't know enough about Glulx.
On Nov 28, 10:50 pm, sloke <loke...@gmail.com> wrote:
> So displaying unicode eg Chinese is still not easy in TADS3. Do you > have any pointers on how to do so?
Not really. The TADS 3 documentation has instructions about using other character sets, and I made it working a long time ago. My most recent playing with TADS 3 wasn't as successful, though. I was hanging out on the TADS 3 mailing list then, so maybe you can find something useful in the list archive.
> How about writing one from scratch then? Something like with gui like > ADRIFT rather than another interpreted language.
I don't see how that would be easier than modifying/extending TADS 3. Actually I am pretty sure it would be harder. If you know programming, though, you are free to try whatever you feel like, of course.
Ming Hua wrote: > As far as I know, the Z-machine backend can't handle Asian languages > because it has a very small fixed-size character set. The Glulx > backend probably can, but I don't know enough about Glulx.
Z-code and Glulx can both handle Unicode (though with input limitations for Z-code): there's an example in Inform 7 that prints out in Greek and Cyrillic, for example. At least displaying Chinese characters should be possible in either, provided the interpreter had a font with those characters in it.
On Dec 1, 5:10 pm, David Kinder <da...@david.david> wrote:
> Ming Hua wrote: > > As far as I know, the Z-machine backend can't handle Asian languages > > because it has a very small fixed-size character set. The Glulx > > backend probably can, but I don't know enough about Glulx.
> Z-code and Glulx can both handle Unicode (though with input limitations for > Z-code): there's an example in Inform 7 that prints out in Greek and > Cyrillic, for example. At least displaying Chinese characters should be > possible in either, provided the interpreter had a font with those > characters in it.
I see that you are listed as the author/editor of "Z-Machine Standard 1.1 Document", so I believe you know much better about Z-machine than I do. However after reading section 3, especially 3.8.5, of Z-machine standard 1.0 (I can't find any full version 1.1 document), my understanding is as follows:
Z-machine (v5 or later) provides a way to map ZSCII 155-251 to any characters in Unicode BMP (U+0001 to U+FFFF), using a "unicode translation table".
However, Chinese has a huge character set. The most basic daily usage probably needs about 1,500 characters, and the commonly used characters are in the 3,000-4,000 range. If my understanding about Z- machine's Unicode support is correct, I fail to see how it can support a full Chinese IF, which needs much more than the 97 extra characters Z-machine provide.
> On Dec 1, 5:10 pm, David Kinder <da...@david.david> wrote:
> > Ming Hua wrote: > > > As far as I know, the Z-machine backend can't handle Asian languages > > > because it has a very small fixed-size character set. The Glulx > > > backend probably can, but I don't know enough about Glulx.
> > Z-code and Glulx can both handle Unicode (though with input limitations for > > Z-code): there's an example in Inform 7 that prints out in Greek and > > Cyrillic, for example. At least displaying Chinese characters should be > > possible in either, provided the interpreter had a font with those > > characters in it.
> I see that you are listed as the author/editor of "Z-Machine Standard > 1.1 Document", so I believe you know much better about Z-machine than > I do. However after reading section 3, especially 3.8.5, of Z-machine > standard 1.0 (I can't find any full version 1.1 document), my > understanding is as follows:
> Z-machine (v5 or later) provides a way to map ZSCII 155-251 to any > characters in Unicode BMP (U+0001 to U+FFFF), using a "unicode > translation table".
> However, Chinese has a huge character set. The most basic daily usage > probably needs about 1,500 characters, and the commonly used > characters are in the 3,000-4,000 range. If my understanding about Z- > machine's Unicode support is correct, I fail to see how it can support > a full Chinese IF, which needs much more than the 97 extra characters > Z-machine provide.
> Please correct me if my understanding is wrong.
> Ming > 2007.12.01
Well, I just tested with two full songs' worth of Japanese lyrics complete with kanji, and I didn't run into any such limitations. The problem, however, is that Inform 7 translates Unicode characters into substitutions based on their full names, meaning that a couple of lines of text will run smack into the compiler's limitation on string length. It's possible to work around this by separating paragraphs into lines printed with individual "say" instructions, but it's fairly kludgy. (Line breaking, to my experience, must also be handled with explicit line break substitutions in this case.)
Ming Hua wrote: > I see that you are listed as the author/editor of "Z-Machine Standard > 1.1 Document", so I believe you know much better about Z-machine than > I do.
I only made some minor revisions to that: all the hard work was done by Graham Nelson (for Standard 1.0) and then Kevin Bracey and Jason Penney.
> Z-machine (v5 or later) provides a way to map ZSCII 155-251 to any > characters in Unicode BMP (U+0001 to U+FFFF), using a "unicode > translation table".
This is true. However, for output you can get around this with the @print_unicode opcode, which allows the game to output any Unicode character in the range U+0001 to U+FFFF, regardless of whether or not it's in the Unicode translation table.
> However, Chinese has a huge character set. The most basic daily usage > probably needs about 1,500 characters, and the commonly used > characters are in the 3,000-4,000 range. If my understanding about Z- > machine's Unicode support is correct, I fail to see how it can support > a full Chinese IF, which needs much more than the 97 extra characters > Z-machine provide.
Output is possible, but tackling input in Z-code is a rather more difficult problem. At that point I would give in and switch to Glulx or TADS, which both allow arbitrary Unicode input and output.
Still, given the number of possible input characters, I don't know how a game library could cope with Chinese input even if it could read in the Unicode input. This may go some way to explaining why there aren't any text adventure systems supporting Chinese that anyone's aware of ...
On 28 nov, 11:54, sloke <loke...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> I would like to know if there are available any system that can be > used to create IF using asian languages, eg Chinese, even if it is > just a miminal system, without all the linguistic parsing except for > simple pattern matching. I understand there are some that is unicode, > and so can display unicode text, but what about actions?
> Thanks.
I don't know if there are any in Chinese, but there seems to be a series of several pseudo-interactive fiction games in Japanese, called "Misty", by Data West.
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