Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Path: gmd.de!Germany.EU.net!news.dfn.de!darwin.sura.net!haven.umd.edu!uunet!ddsw1!chinet!jorn
From: jorn@chinet.chi.il.us (Jorn Barger)
Subject: Re: Jorn wants bodyparts!!!
Message-ID: <C49wF5.1sK@chinet.chi.il.us>
Organization: Chinet - Public Access UNIX
References: <C45MCt.LC8@chinet.chi.il.us> <C47Lv4.JEo@chinet.chi.il.us> <neilg.732737239@sfu.ca>
Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1993 04:28:17 GMT
Lines: 94

Neil K. Guy writes:
> So, how much
> detail are your characters gonna have, Jorn?

Lessee...:  hair, eyes, face?, lips, tongue, hands, feet, breasts, 
genitals, and asses, certainly.  But so much of foreplay involves ears 
and neck and nose, that they're probably next...?

Besides 'erotic contact', you need bodyparts for gesturing, too.  Here's 
some bodypart-quotes (not real helpful this time, sorry.)

    ...two gentle puddinges Soft & white,
        fill'd with delight.
        17th C. lyric (3)

    Magic is tangled in a woman's hair
    For the entanglement of male pride.
        Robert Graves "The Snap-Comb Wilderness"

            ...only God, my dear,
    Could love you for yourself alone
    And not your yellow hair.
        William Butler Yeats (Irish 1865-1939)
        "For Anne Gregory" (1932)

At fifteen, I was able to compose my eyebrows...
        Li Po (Chinese? 701-762) (tr. Shigeyoshi Obata) (I think this one
deserves some thought)

    There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip,
    Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out
    At every joint and motive of her body.
        Shakespeare "Troilus and Cressida"

    I, with whose eyes her eyes committed theft
        Fulke Greville, lord Brooke (England 1554-1628)

There is a sense of one's own face as stretched, as thinned, which goes 
with extreme joy.  I felt as if my face were simply a stretched skin, the 
features vanished, the pure radiance blazing through.
        Iris Murdoch [A Word Child]

A woman with eyes only for one person, or with eyes always averted from 
him, creates exactly the same impression.
        Jean de la Bruyere (French 1645-96)


[nkg again, ... clothing-layers in TADS:]
>  But basically I maintain three separate lists aside from the adv.t
> defined "Me" object, which contains all carried items. Clothing comes
> in three types - TopClothes (worn on the upper torso), BottomClothes
> (worn on the lower torso) and other.

Ah!   "Close 'B' clothes-mode on Deputy Dan..."   "Oh my duck, his 
*pants* have disappeared!" (Firesign Theater, I Think We're All Bozos on 
This Bus:  the first line is spoken by an extremely early (c1970) 
*hacker*/cracker to a computer-controlled Disneyland-type holographic 
policeman, the 2nd is Barney-the-Bozo's alarmed response ;^)

[implementation sketch omitted]

Yeah, that seems reasonable.  In fact, representing layers of clothes as 
a LIFO stack could be a textbook example of appropriate datastructuring!  
I don't really see any problem with the upperzone/ lowerzone 
simplification, either-- it covers the territory fine!

> >What am I wearing?
> You're wearing a red T-shirt, a pair of jeans and a silver pendant,
> and you're carrying a leather jacket.
> 
> >Put on the leather jacket.
> There's something intensely personal and warm about the jacket, and
> the act of putting it on bears the close familiarity of habit.

(Hmmm.. is this a clue?  Or just decorative texture?)

[...]
>  Note that the "what am I wearing?" sentence construct only works
> because I severely hacked up adv.t to do it. It's kind of a cheap,
> hardcoded hack, but I thought it was worth it for some reason...

A quick search of adv.t for "wear" seems to show that, currently, the 
only way to know what you're wearing is to try taking it off?  (Or does 
"inventory" list clothes, too?)

>  [...]   Ironically, the only
> reason I have clothes in the game was to permit marginally more
> realistic swimming (every tried to swim fully clothed? Hard, isn't
> it?) but then I fell down a pernicious slippery slope thereafter.

It's perfect!  But didn't you end up using it as the structure behind 
other puzzles?

Jorn
