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From: neilg@fraser.sfu.ca (Neil K. Guy)
Subject: Re: Non-English adventures (was Re: Adventure design)
Message-ID: <neilg.729896286@sfu.ca>
Sender: news@sfu.ca
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
References: <neilg.729555282@sfu.ca> <)> <1lp2faINNeb@life.ai.mit.edu> <1993Feb16.143037.12175@pollux.lu.se>
Date: Tue, 16 Feb 1993 20:58:06 GMT
Lines: 62

magnus@thep.lu.se (Magnus Olsson) writes:

>So the parser should really be accomodating, and accept the following
>forms of the command:

>"Ta den r{\"o}da dolken" ("Take the red dagger").
>"Ta r{\"o}da dolken" (still definite form, but only one definite article)
>"Ta r{\"o}d dolk" ("Take red dagger") - never mind if it sounds stupid!
>"Ta en r{\"o}d dolk" ("Take one red dagger") if there are several.

 Hmmm... Well, given what you've said I don't *think* it's necessary
for a TADS game (sorry to keep going on about TADS for all those
non-TADS users; it's the only system I know in any detail) to have a
"purist" parser, as you put it. Each object can have more than one
noun and adjective associated with it, making implementation easy.

 So, the standard "takeVerb" would have a verb of 'ta'. Then the
dagger could have 'dolken' and 'dolk' as nouns and 'r{\"o}da' and
'r{\"o}d' as adjectives. Since articles ( 'den' and 'en' ) are
ignored, they can be put in anyway. Of course, this makes it possible
for the user to input grammatically weird commands (presumably "Ta en
r{\"o}d dolken" is totally wrong) and have the parser accept them.
Which shouldn't be a problem, right? I mean, this is supposed to be a
text adventure and not a computer-assisted Swedish-language training
program. :)

>So the parser really should know a lot more about grammar than in the
>equivalent English case.

 It sounds to me more like the implementer has to think about more
grammatical permutations and then code them in - it's not really the
parser that's doing the work here.

>Another problem is how to represent characters that aren't in ASCII.

 This could be a real problem here. Until such time that TADS accepts
platform-dependent character sets this might be dodgy. You could put
together a cheap hack in which the accents are ignored. Your dagger
example might have adjectives set as 'rod' and 'roda', and a user
could type in unaccented words. To make it less horrible, you could
also put a platform-dependent preparse function in that would turn all
accented characters into their unaccented equivalents.

 That's what I'm thinking of doing with my pipe-dream French game. The
big drawback is that if there are two different words distinguished
only by accents then the game may be unable to distinguish them
properly. (does this happen in Swedish?)

>I don't know if TADS is 8-bit transparent, but even if it is there
>would be difficulties porting the adventure between different
>platforms.

 Yes. You'd have to do some minor rewrites and recompile each port.
Since there are only two supported TADS 2.0 platforms out there now,
this isn't a problem. But who knows in the future?

 Anyway. Sorry if this is boring anyone who doesn't care much about
writing non-English games. Heck, I find it kind of interesting,
though. Let's just not start a thread about "Computer Writes Swedish-
Language Book." :)

 - Neil K. (n_k_guy@sfu.ca)
