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From: meta@pobox.com (mathew)
Subject: Re: [Announcement]: Obsidio (a new IF system)
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Chris M. <chris@jons.org> wrote:
> Well, personally I find that the IF systems like Hugo, and TADS, ect.
> to be rather complicated because I don't know C.

I think it's awfully unfair on TADS to compare it to C.

> And I've read other
> messages in here, where some people have mentioned that they have good
> ideas, but they don't want to learn procedures and functions to get a
> game out there.

Most art requires the tedious learning of technique.  There are
shortcuts -- "painting by numbers", for example -- but you inevitably
lose a great deal by taking the shortcuts.

I'm pretty much convinced that art is necessarily hard work.  I came to
this realization by trying to make pictures in the style of Mondrian.
It looks like a piece of cake -- just a bunch of lines and a couple of
colored squares.  It's when you try it for real that you realise how
incredibly difficult it can be to produce something that looks like a
child of five could do it.

> So I'm going to try to write my language based more on something story
> authors would be familiar with, such as pages and chapters. Or perhaps
> Acts (as in a play).

Well, I think that programming (in the broad sense) is inevitably going
to be a necessary part of IF authoring -- at least for any game which is
novel enough to be interesting.

You can make the language look nice and less imposing to the author; you
can provide extensive class libraries of common objects to take away a
lot of the tedious work.  But sooner or later, you have to have some way
to describe in accurate notation the intended behavior of various
abstract pieces of data used to model objects you might find in the real
world.  And that's programming, no matter how nice you make it look.  It
will involve procedures and functions, no matter what you name them.

You could call functions "recipes", say, and call variables
"ingredients" -- but would it really help new users?  It would certainly
leave them confused if they turned to a book on programming in the hope
of getting assistance...


mathew
--
No taxation without representation!
