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From: erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
Subject: Re: Hugo vs. TADS/Inform
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Date: Mon, 16 Sep 1996 17:27:07 GMT
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Cardinal Teulbachs (cardinalt@earthlink.net) wrote:
> Why, indeed? Is it because TADS and Inform are prima facie the best
> authoring systems available? I think not. I've been at this business
> in a serious way for a few years now, and I do not think either TADS
> or Inform are necessarily the best choice in a text-adventure system.
> This is not to say that either of them are bad systems--far from
> it--but merely that there *is* another choice, and I'm not talking
> about AGT or Alan, either. There is Hugo. 

Boost though you may, Hugo is under-represented because it's newer. That's
the long and short of it.  And what you're doing is exactly the right
response (along with writing more Hugo games, which I assume you're doing
also.)

> As powerful as either Inform
> or TADS (perhaps more)

Ok, here's my one cent. I downloaded the Hugo source to see if I could do 
a half-hour Mac port. (I couldn't -- no surprise -- no programming 
project takes half an hour on the Mac.) But when I was looking through 
the source, I noted that the parser resides in the Hugo run-time, not the 
game file.

This gets right to the basic claim of the Inform boosters (like me :-),
which is that the Z-machine has an order of magnitude less hard-wiring
than any other portable IF format. (And I'm not just talking about Tetris.
Note the post, earlier in this thread, which mentions three-noun verb
constructs. Note the fact that even though the standard Inform library 
doesn't support real adjectives, there's source code to put them in. 
Ditto for daemons that execute in a specified order each turn.)

On a related note, how hard would it be to get the Hugo compiler to 
generate Z-machine files instead of Hugo runtime files?

--Z

-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."
