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From: neilg@fraser.sfu.ca (Neil K. Guy)
Subject: Re: Non-English adventures (was Re: Adventure design)
Message-ID: <neilg.729555282@sfu.ca>
Sender: news@sfu.ca
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
References: <930112.095148.ahaavie@pcifm02> <1993Feb12.112523.7231@pollux.lu.se>
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 1993 22:14:42 GMT
Lines: 62

 Magnus, you write:

> In Swedish, a room description could end with 'Det finns en l{\aa}da
> h\"ar' - "There's a box here" (I'm using TeX notation for the special
> Swedish characters), but if you wanted to take the box, you would have
> to say "ta l{\aa}dan" - "take the box". "Ta l{\aa}da" would sound very
> strange.

 Actually, is this necessarily a problem using TADS? I know nothing
about Swedish grammatical rules, but given what you've said couldn't
you do this in TADS:

laada: item
    sdesc = "l{\aa}da"
    adesc = "en l{\aa}da"
    ldesc = "Det finns en l{\aa}da h\"ar. "
    noun = 'l{\aa}dan'
    location = Stockholm
;

 Since TADS uses different strings to represent nouns (entered by the
user) and description text (displayed by the computer) the player
could refer to the box as one thing (l{\aa}dan) even though the
computer would talk about there being a "l{\aa}da" here. Does this
make any sense?

> [...]  the telegraphic
> style used in a typical IF command: "Take red dagger. Put it in
> purse." is at least almost correct English, but anyone expressing
> himself similarly in Swedish would sound like a half-wit. This not only
> makes the required parser more complicated, but also makes it far more
> cumbersome to play the game.

 Actually, I'd say that anyone saying "take red dagger" in English is
likely to sound like a half-wit. :) But how is Swedish different in this
sense? Isn't there an imperative form of verbs that is at least vaguely
similar in structure? Or do verb forms change, like in German, depending
on the case (nominative, dative, accusative, etc.) Longer forms of
verbal commands should be possible, assuming that they can be broken
down to something reasonably close to verb-noun.

 Of course, having access to the parser source might make or break such
a project, and TADS source isn't available. You might be able to construct
weird hacks to get past certain problems, by using certain words as
prepositions when they're really not, or by using the compoundWord feature
to glue parts of words together to make for easier processing. I've had
to do this in my (English) game in order to get the game to accept such
sentence constructions as "Who am I?" or "What's the weather like?".

 I'll probably have to do this to get French to work. Most imperative
verbs should be able to work (albeit in a clumsy fashion) but there are
some sentence forms that might be extremely difficult. Articles shouldn't
be too much of a problem. Just as English TADS doesn't distinguish
between the user typing "a box" or typing "the box," a French game could
just treat "le bo^ite" and "la bo^ite" as the same thing, even though
boxes are feminine. (of course, it would always display "une bo^ite"
on the screen.)

 Anyway, not to go on about TADS, but I haven't used ALAN and I've
never been able to get AdvSys to work. Just some vague ideas...

 - Neil K. (n_k_guy@sfu.ca)
