Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
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From: ads@netcom.com (Anthony Spataro)
Subject: Re: Limitations of Inform and TADS?
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Date: Thu, 2 Nov 1995 07:34:43 GMT
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Alfredo Liu-Perez (alp@miller.cs.uwm.edu) wrote:
:   IF games will someday will be more popular than books, but that day is
: still far into the future. What we need is having better interation with
: NPCs. The day we can't tell the difference between communicating with an
: NPC or communicating with someone over irc, is the day IF becomes more
: popular than books. I'd love to interact with my favorite book characters.
:   
: >Why does stagnation concern you?  And why do you feel that this would be 
: >caused by the compilers?
:   
:   I don't know what TADS or Inform do, but from previous messages it seems
: they are almost programming languages themselves. If that's the case, it
: would be possible to give more intelligence to NPCs, and give them a way of
: representing knowledge of what goes on around them. At the time, NPCs give
: the impression of intelligence, but they don't seem to remember what has
: being said, don't react normally, and don't seem to change the plot. 
:   My feeling was that maybe the programs used to write these games had
: limitations that prevented such features in NPCs. Maybe it is lack of
: motivation, or the exponential growth in memory needed that keeps these
: NPC features from becoming a reality.

TADS and Inform are really languages in their own right; it's just that 
they are specialized for IF (i.e. they provide a built-in parser).

IF is fun, I agree.  But a few simple additions make it an order of 
magnitude more entertaining.  Take Gateway ][: Homeworld.  You add music, 
still pictures and a couple graphical interface widgets, and you've got 
IF that actually sells!

I've been doing work on NPC interaction.  So far, I've gotten a system 
working where the player determines the flow of conversation by choosing 
from a list of possible responses.  Actually providing AI-style 
facilities for NPC interaction would take a lot more work, and might not 
even be as rewarding.  If Bob is playing IF set in Colonial America and 
he gets a choice of responses worded in the dialect of the period, it's 
going to make him feel a lot more in-character than if he's allowed to 
type "Yo, dude!"
-- 
 _/\_   apathy: received SIGH, exiting. Why even bother to dump core?
/ L  \  =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= 
\_ C_/  Assertiveness is strength.  Strength is power.  Power is authority. 
  \/    Authority is asinine.

It seems like the less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the
flag.
