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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: Default parser responses: how do they affect the gaming / authorship experience?
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Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2002 20:51:55 GMT
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Dennis G Jerz <jerzdg@uwec.edu> wrote:
[snip much material I agree with]

I note that, w.r.t. deadflag, I almost always change the
message from "You have died" to "You have lost", assuming
the game allows losing at all (most of mine do not).

I have suggested before that we should have multiple default
library message sets, since changing all of them is too much
work for very small games (e.g. minicomp games), and it
doesn't seem like it would be too much work, but nobody's
ever followed up on it. I've also had to rewrite them
all several times, enough that I've published a document
designed to help people who are changing ALL library
messages--http://nothings.org/games/if/lm.txt

With respect to cave crawls, I've also suggested in the past
that many of the properties which seem inherent to IF are
really accidental properties derived from history. The choice
of which things we simulate (rooms, containers, doors, locks)
tops my list.

>Yet the animators for Monsters Inc. worked in a complex simulated
>universe that handled such things as the motion of fabric, the effect
>of wind on hair, water absorption, etc.  That meant that animators
>didn't have to animate every ripple of fabric or lock of hair.
>Monsters Inc. is, of course, a linear narrative.

Just a general-purpose correction here: computer animators do not
work in simulated universes. What you see on the screen is generally
a set; things are not happening offscreen; often characters are
rendered independently of the background and composited, rather than
being rendered in the combined scene. They had *tools* which would
run simulations of cloth and hair, but these simulations didn't
constitute a universe; the animator might attach the clothes to a
body and animate that body and even have the simulation run automatically
to animate the cloth, but there's generally no sense of a single
coherent universe; e.g. in a typical animation package the cloth and
the hair would not interact correctly.

3d computer GAMES do generally have a simulated universe, of course;
the analogy between 3d games and movie CGI maps reasonably well onto
IF and fiction written with a word processor.

SeanB
