Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
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From: neilg@fraser.sfu.ca (Neil K. Guy)
Subject: Re: Non-English adventures (was Re: Adventure design)
Message-ID: <neilg.729816813@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> <neilg.729555282@sfu.ca>) <1lp2faINNeb@life.ai.mit.edu>
Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1993 22:53:33 GMT
Lines: 35

dmb@case.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett) writes:

>>x me
>It looks like an ordinary you.

 It's a shame how languages are so irregular... I've found I've had to
special case a whole ton of these things, just to avoid weird
messages. I've also put in plural functions so the game can respond:

>shout at the privet bush

  The privet bush doesn't pay any attention to you.

>shout at the frogs

  The frogs don't pay any attention to you.

 That sort of thing is pretty easy to do. But verb cases do get
awfully messy sometimes, even in English.

>To work for outputting other languages, ADV.T would at the very least
>have to be updated to have "desc's" for number, gender, and all the
>various syntactic cases.

 As someone pointed out earlier, gender articles could probably be put
in, as long as the language wasn't dependent upon accurate use of
articles. Thus it'd be possible to type a grammatically incorrect
command, but the game would accept it anyway.

 Well, I guess it's all part of the fun. I don't know if Esperanto
would be any easier to code than Hungarian as a text adventure, but I
think language irregularities are just part of the richness of human
experience...

 - Neil K. (n_k_guy@sfu.ca)
