Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Parser Techniques
From: gdighton@geocities.com (Garth Dighton)
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Date: 28 Jun 2001 12:23:41 -0500
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thornley@visi.com (David Thornley) wrote in
<_YH_6.4422$B7.766658@ruti.visi.com>:

>In article <3b3a1e34_4@goliath.newsgroups.com>,
>Garth Dighton <gdighton@geocities.com> wrote:
>>thornley@visi.com (David Thornley) wrote in
>><A7n_6.4053$B7.628545@ruti.visi.com>:
>>
>>>Python is a nice clean language, but it's questionable whether
>>>it's enough better than TADS to justify the lesser familiarity
>>>(more IF players have TADS and zcode interpreters installed than
>>>Python, I'd imagine).
>>
>>The one nice thing about PAWS is that it uses a truly complete language
>>(i.e. Python) - so you could do things like create entire maps, etc. on
>>the fly. One vaporware project I was thinking of was to use PAWS to
>>write a dungeon-crawl text adventure (and it really would be "text
>>adventure" rather than "interactive fiction"), where the rooms,
>>monsters, and treasures would be randomly generated as you explored.
>
>Have you looked at roguelike games?  Those in general do what
>you are talking about, although with a different interface.
>I find them an excellent replacement for the sort of D&D I played
>in the 1970s.
>

I play Angband (and Pernangband, and Cthangband, etc), so yes - I've also
started writing my own roguelike in Lua. However, I wanted something more
CRPG like, where you could have a party of characters to command - despite
Teamangband, and pets in Adom/Nethack/some 'bands (none of which I can
stand - I always dismiss all pets ASAP), roguelikes are very much a single-
character against the world game. The IF-type parser seemed to me to be the
best way to go for this - The Frenetic Five games, for instance, already
feature a team of protagonists (superhero rather than dungeon-crawling
party perhaps, but the principle is definitely there).


> While TADS/Inform
>>have some capability along these lines, I don't think they could handle
>>this sort of project.
>>
>Dunno about that.  TADS is a full programming language (and presumably
>so is Inform, although I can't speak to that from personal knowledge).
>I don't know that you could do this in Python and not TADS.

The big problem I can see is that their mechanisms for generating -new-
objects at runtime are rather ugly and difficult to work with - whereas,
with PAWS, all of your objects are a Python class with a global
instantiation, and it's trivial to instantiate a new instance - you just do
it in a function instead of globally.


SPOILER WARNING - Much heavier spoiler than David's
>
>SPOILER WARNING:  Mild spoiler for "Hunter, In Darkness"
>F
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>Have you looked at the game "Hunter, In Darkness"?  It's written
>in Inform and has a dynamically generated maze.  I believe the
>author, Zarf, has made source available.
>

As I understand it, while the maze is dynamically generated - it's still
Wumpus, which is a fairly limited number of rooms (20, I think).

--
Garth Dighton


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