Message-ID: <3AED60E5.2E14B30C@csi.com>
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 08:56:06 -0400
From: John Colagioia <JColagioia@csi.com>
Organization: No Conspiracy Here...
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Subject: Re: Sycamora Tree: "Inform is outdated"
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Papalogic wrote:

> In message <9c665c$3ji$1@news.lth.se>
>           mol@pobox.com (Magnus Olsson) wrote:
> > In article <3ae641a0.1807434@news.earthlink.net>,
> >  <johnesco@NOSPAMearthlink.net> wrote:
> >> I think text adventures could make great use of modern CPU's.
> >> So far there is no parser with in line spell corrections like Word.
> > I'm not sure this is a good idea. "Guess the verb" is bad enough when
> > you're doing the guessing. Imagine what it would be like if the parser did
> > the guessing for you :-).
> > More seriously: one problem is that if you make a typo, the spell checker
> > may think you meant another word than the one you intended. In an IF game,
> > this may give things away.
> > Another problem is that if you try to use a word that's simply not
> > implemented, because the author didn't think of it, it will be take as a
> > typo and "corrected". I think that would be extremely irritating.
> These problems only manifest themselves if the game is dependent on a tiny
> and specific dictionary, which of course current-format games (ie, Z-machine,
> etc.) are...

Not at all, if you think about all the things that one might be called upon to do
in IF.  Consider Beyond Zork:
    ] NAME THE PTERODACTYL "FROZZLE"
    [Word not recognized; correcting "frozzle" to "frotz."]
Argh!

And, yeah, you could have added rules about quoted material, which could add to
the dictionary.  But then you might also have randomly-generated names, which
would also have to be added to the dictionary.  Consider this idea, where the
player is going to grab the gold bars:
    ] GET THE GOLF
    [Word not recognized; correcting "golf" to "glfo."]
    [The glfo spell]
    You can't see the glfo spell here.
Oops.

This could, as you suggest, be helped by adapting the scoping rules, but the vast
programming effort that this would entail wouldn't warrant it, I think.  And,
again, you're still interfering with the player, at some level, which doesn't
seem like a good thing to me.

However, just indicating dictionary misspellings (possibly with underlines like
in Word), and un-indicating them when they're proven to be real words (like a
command containing the word succeeds) might be far better by being less intrusive
to the player, and much more realistic in terms of programming effort.


