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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: [INFORM] Menu-driven conversation
Message-ID: <GBGzAp.1A7@world.std.com>
Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2001 10:47:12 GMT
References: <9apd42$sk8$1@news.lth.se>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
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Xref: news.duke.edu rec.arts.int-fiction:85241

In article <9apd42$sk8$1@news.lth.se>, Magnus Olsson <mol@pobox.com> wrote:
>But I have some vague memory of having seen a game where the
>conversation menus are more like typical Inform help menus
>
>And is there any source code available for this kind of conversation
>menus? (There is for the other kind of menus; phtalkoo.h, for example).

I believe you are looking for converse.h, by L. Ross Raszewski:
ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/programming/inform6/library/contributions/converse.h

Personally I dislike switching to fullscreen
conversations--too significant a break from the rest of
the play, and you give up all the context and the ability
to scrollback through it reasonably.

On the programming side, converse.h, like the hint system, uses
object trees to encode the conversations.

If you want phototalk-style menus but programming using object trees,
I believe there are a few unpublished libraries to do so--I have one
but the game I wrote it for was never completed, so it's undertested,
and I believe the author of The Big Mama talked about releasing his
conversation system, which also worked that way.

SeanB
