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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: NLP Question
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Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 08:21:41 GMT
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Andrew Plotkin  <erkyrath@eblong.com> wrote:
>Here, Daniel Barkalow <iabervon@iabervon.org> wrote:
>> Features I think would improve Inform:
>>  - Looking in directions:
>>     The descriptions of the walls, ceiling, floor, and the dark should be
>>      properties of the room, with library defaults.
>
>This is one of those features that it's hard to take a *little bit* of
>advantage of, when you're designing your game. If most of the
>direction-looking in a game produces default messages, the player
>is going to give up on the command entirely, quite soon.

Actually, the specific thing requested--descriptions of the *entities*,
not the directions--would be nice to have. Every so often, perhaps every
other game or so, I have one place where people will naturally examine
or refer to the west wall or the floor. So I add a wall or floor
scenery object, put a description on it, and when people refer to it,
the parser prints a disambiguation warning since there were two such
floors or walls. It's such a small thing it's never been worth my
effort to figure out how to get rid of that message.

Just being able to set a property on the room would be simple
and convenient, and I might not shy away from mentioning floors
and rooms as I tend to.

Maybe I'll kick out a library extension to do just that sometime.

SeanB
