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From: isgi@ztivax.zfe.siemens.de (Oliver Rothe)
Subject: Re: Actions that take more than a turn (was Re: When should "all" be allowed?)
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Date: Thu, 17 Mar 1994 09:18:12 GMT
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Jason Noble (jnoble@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au) wrote:
> How might this be implemented?  If anyone else has done it already (you must
> be out there) I'd love to hear from you.  I'm thinking about doing it one of
> two ways (or maybe both combined):

> 1) the game has a way of recognising happenings that the player will almost
> certainly be interested in responding to, eg. being attacked, having
> something stolen, the entry of someone obviously hostile, becoming hungry /
> thirsty, bomb fuse mesages and the like.  Each cycle of a "wait until
> midnight"-type command, a check is made to see if anything like this has
> occurred.  If so, the waiting (or searching or whatever) is interrupted and
> the player can enter a new command.

>     AND / OR

> 2) whenever the game is cycling through player turns for something like
> "wait until midnight", the computer checks each cycle to see if the player
> has pressed a key.  The player is notified in the documentation that
> [...]

In a couple of Infocom games ("Suspect" comes to my mind), a third approach
is implemented:
Whenever an important event happens, the player is asked:

"Do you want to go on with <whatever you are doing>? (Y/N)"

This is the best approach because:
a) it's from Infocom ;-)
b) if you deliberately want to go on, you can do that easily (just type
   Y<CR>)
c) you can't miss an opportunity to interrupt what you're doing
   (your reaction time should not be important for solving an Infocom game;
    "Borderzone" being the only exception).

Oliver

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Oliver Rothe				isgi@ztivax.zfe.siemens.de
		also reachable via:	100265.1543@compuserve.com


