Random thoughts

[Skullduggery]

Although I appreciate a dedicated forum to Hugo, I wonder sometimes at the wisdom of it. Meaning, given that Hugo receives very little airtime in r.a.i.f as it is, wouldn't posting there be more beneficial to the community at large? Many lurkers or newcomers may have no idea that this place exists, and in the meantime, only TADS and Inform seem to get any airtime, ergo, Hugo must not be a viable platform.

Secondly, as a newbie to both programming and Hugo, I find the manual...leaves something to be desired. (Sorry, Kent...I can't even imagine the amount of time you've put into both the development system and the documentation, and I thank you for both.) However, I wonder whether something akin to the new beginner's guide to Inform (or whatever it's called) might be possible. I've been keeping notes on my own learning, and perhaps I may be able to pen such a treatise myself one day. In the meantime, however, the lack of such a resource limits the number of potential Hugo-philes. If there's a single area where both TADS and Inform outclass Hugo, it's in the documentation.

Yes, source code is helpful to an extent, but if you don't really know what's going on to begin with, it's just a bunch of gobbledegook. (Non-programmer, remember.) I've downloaded all available source (thanks again to both Kent and Robb, as well as others for making it available)...particularly helpful to me was just seeing how things were organized, which in some ways is the most puzzling aspect of programming for me. Other source like that of Christminster were also helpful in this regard.

Finally, I'm curious about the mentions I've seen of a printed Hugo manual through the IFLibrary. Would this simply be a bound copy of the existing manual, or is there a revision in the works? I'd be happy to give a revision a proofread from a newbie perspective. :)

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Although I appreciate a dedicated forum to Hugo, I wonder sometimes at the wisdom of it. Meaning, given that Hugo receives very little airtime in r.a.i.f as it is, wouldn't posting there be more beneficial to the community at large? Many lurkers or newcomers may have no idea that this place exists, and in the meantime, only TADS and Inform seem to get any airtime, ergo, Hugo must not be a viable platform.

Your point is well taken. Although I would say that I tend to post with a different "voice" on Usenet than I do on a BBS like this. Knowing that I can't edit a post on RAIF, I don't want to make a factual error or have a gross mis-spelling on a post that is archived for all eternity. Additionally, with there being less of us in this forum, something like the "Burning Down the House" pre-release discussion is feasible.

I suspect that a lot of people who are on the IF Mud know that I run this BBS (and the Hugo base along with it). I hadn't mentioned it to the Usenet newsgroup at large, as that would imply that there would be posts here on a regular basis... and I wasn't sure if that would be the case or not. But I can always add the sig to my signature, to get the word out there in a non-intrusive manner.

[Protagonist X]

...given that Hugo receives very little airtime in r.a.i.f as it is, wouldn't posting there be more beneficial to the community at large? Many lurkers or newcomers may have no idea that this place exists, and in the meantime, only TADS and Inform seem to get any airtime, ergo, Hugo must not be a viable platform.

But I can always add the sig to my signature, to get the word out there in a non-intrusive manner.

No, no, no. Hugo is overlooked just because 95% of the IF authors out there choose other systems to program on, right?

This screams for yet another parody of the Apple 'Switch' ads, seen here: http://www.apple.com/switch/ads/


* * *
[CU OF ROBB SHERWIN ON A WHITE BACKGROUND. PLINKING BANJO-LIKE SFX FROM THE APPLE COMMERCIALS START UP]

"So I was trying to put some graphics into Inform, and, uh..."

[JUMP CUT, ROBB WAVES HANDS ANIMATEDLY]

"...I had to use this, like, unpronouncable monster of a library, Glulx, it --"

[JUMP CUT ]

"--sounds like something out of H.P. Lovecraft, doesn't it? 'Glulx.' Jeez, Pat, I'd like to buy a vowel..."

[JUMP CUT]

"And there's all this, all this shoving hexadecimal garbage around just to throw up a picture of Delarion, and I had to email Zarf twice, three times to thrash out a system to divide the screen into different portions..."

[JUMP CUT]

It was a relief to get to Hugo, and to have a language built to support... graphics, sound, whatever, not grafted onto some virtual machine from the Seventies..."

[JUMP CUT]

"Easier to use. Oh yeah, I'm, uh, I'm only sorry I didn't download Hugo sooner."

[BRIEF PAUSE, JUMP CUT to CLOSER FRONT SHOT OF ROBB]

"My name is Ice Cream Jonesy, aaaand I'm the sysop on a BBS."

* * *

Get some shots from the Digital Camera over to Lex and have him whip up something in Flash. Remember to sound "spontaneous" and "unrehearsed" when you record the sound. Lot's of "ums" and "uhs." Sell it!

[Understatement Man]

lol

[Eric]

This thread brings to mind a Hugo query which I'll get to eventually...

I gotta admit I'm unlikely to ever write a proper IF game. Writing IF is just grossly time consuming even for someone who has some facility with a language, I gather. But for a nonprogrammer who's endlessly learning as he goes -- forget it. I am just finishing co-authoring a mystery novel. I reckon, even if I knew Hugo, it'd take me twice as long, at least, to write a game the size of FOD as to write novel, by myself. (Of course, how about, "The Mystery of the Stove"?) And, honestly, it'd be a pretty ridiculous misallocation of my time to screw around with a what would be a half-assed game cause I don't know what I'm doing rather than writing the decent book I can finally produce after plenty of practice and which has some chance of getting published.

All the same I like toying with If and writing down a lot of junk and seeing the computer do something with it. Whoa!!!

But though I have enjoyed some Hugo games I've never warmed up to the language. Not a easy as Alan which I actually have some facility at, let alone ADRIFT (which becomes quickly more mind bending than Alan actually if you want to do anything reasonable) or even as appealing, on the surface as TADS. For some reason, the way you write things in TADS struck me as friendlier than Inform and Hugo, does look more like Inform, or at least so it seemed after it was pointed out to me. (Minor maybe but that having to put // in lines of text in Hugo really made a bad impression when I was just looking at it in a shallow fashion)

But yeah, the problem is, the documention seems to rank opposite to my preferences, with Inform's being the best and the Hugo manual being, well, perfectly fine, but a manual. What little I've learned of other languages I've started with tutorials and then got more from the manuals.

Anyway, I am beginning to wonder what the future holds for Hugo. Is Kent planning big changes? Reason I ask is I learned Alan which Thomas Nilsson is now improving. For one thing he's added classes. Excellent but I'll have to do a fair amount of relearning, plus my older games won't be playable on the new interpreter -- the short game I've been working on, which I figured was too far along to change over to the new Alan, will be "obsolete" by the time I finish. ADRIFT went shareware, and between that and it being Windows only, it isn't much use from a R*IF viewpoint whatever its merits, plus the games I did are obsolete in effect. So I was learning TADS 2 till I stopped to write the aforementioned book. And in the months I've been off IF I've been reading more and more posts on RAIF about TADS 3 so if I ever learn TADS 2 or finish that introcomp thing that'll probably be "obsolete" on arrival. Sure, I know people will play TADS 2 games still, but it is just the idea. So I was wondering how stable Hugo looks right now?

Eric

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

My response will be a lot longer once I get off this Microsoft "Natural" Keyboard, but the short of it is that I think -- and I could very well be wrong -- that Hugo does not have a major revision coming soon which will add significant changes (improvements) to syntax and useability ala Glulx and TADS3.

Argh: plenty more to add, but my words per minute speed is down to like 3 or 4. Will embellish on this ASAP.

[Roody_Yogurt]

As far as the manual goes, I think it's a little unfair to say, "Hey, the manual isn't as good as the Inform DM!" The Inform DM is probably the best IF manual ever written (some on r*if have said that it's the best programming manual they've come across even, I think). I think it is a hard thing to write. As the one who knows the language's scope and intent better than anyone else, the author, I'm guessing, has a hard time knowing exactly how to introduce the system to the unfamiliar. I think Graham Nelson once said something to me along the lines of how he 'can't see the forest through the trees' sometimes and all that (or maybe I just read it somewhere, I dunno). Of course there's also the additional problem of trying to gently introduce programming to non-programmers.

So while it can be said that the Hugo manual may not be the Inform DM (although it keeps on getting better), I think Kent has heard it lots of times so it's really up to us to step up and tell him about things we had problems with understanding and ask for more info and clarifications in future manuals (I believe it's still a work in progress).

I also think that it's good that there's healthy Hugo discussion here. Granted, if it was on r*if, it might be seen by more people but here it is a bit more personal and lends itself to more likely chances that actual results will be produced (I know that's mainly because of Robb's efforts that probably make this place seem a little more productive than it is, but still...). I think there's a good thing going on here.

[Kent]

But though I have enjoyed some Hugo games I've never warmed up to the language. Not a easy as Alan which I actually have some facility at, let alone ADRIFT (which becomes quickly more mind bending than Alan actually if you want to do anything reasonable) or even as appealing, on the surface as TADS. For some reason, the way you write things in TADS struck me as friendlier than Inform and Hugo, does look more like Inform, or at least so it seemed after it was pointed out to me. (Minor maybe but that having to put // in lines of text in Hugo really made a bad impression when I was just looking at it in a shallow fashion)

By "// in lines of text" I assume you mean (depending on the line) appending a '\' character if you need to carry something to the next line. This is a pretty rare occurrence. Earlier in Hugo's development, the compiler did not automatically continue certain kinds of lines (like blocks of text) for you. It has not been necessary for a very long time to append '\' to blocks of text which span multiple lines, but some existing source code out there may still do it.

As for TADS being friendlier, I'm curious, since readability and clarity of source code have been tenets of Hugo's language design from the start. A recent criticism of Hugo on r.a.i-f was that instead of using C-like "&&" and "||" for logical "and" and "or" it actually uses "and" and "or". I didn't know quite how to respond to that one. To move an object from A to B you "move object to B" as opposed to a more C++-ish "object.moveto(B)".

Anyway, I am beginning to wonder what the future holds for Hugo. Is Kent planning big changes? Reason I ask is I learned Alan which Thomas Nilsson is now improving. For one thing he's added classes. Excellent but I'll have to do a fair amount of relearning, plus my older games won't be playable on the new interpreter -- the short game I've been working on, which I figured was too far along to change over to the new Alan, will be "obsolete" by the time I finish. ADRIFT went shareware, and between that and it being Windows only, it isn't much use from a R*IF viewpoint whatever its merits, plus the games I did are obsolete in effect. So I was learning TADS 2 till I stopped to write the aforementioned book. And in the months I've been off IF I've been reading more and more posts on RAIF about TADS 3 so if I ever learn TADS 2 or finish that introcomp thing that'll probably be "obsolete" on arrival. Sure, I know people will play TADS 2 games still, but it is just the idea. So I was wondering how stable Hugo looks right now?

Here I'm not sure what you're asking by "stable", but I can comment (not so) briefly on Hugo's state of development: The basic core of the system (including the compiler, library, and engine) is extremely stable and robust by this point. Even so, it is being actively developed and maintained, with constant enhancements to increase performance, etc. without impacting the robustness of the existing architecture. I'm likely biased, but I'm tempted to say that Hugo is the best _supported_ system out there. There is no longstanding list of compiler/interpreter known bugs/workarounds/etc.: when a bug is reported, I fix it. The feature-request list I exercise a little more dictatorial discretion over, but I've implemented relatively promptly features both big (people asked for a PalmOS port, so I did one) and small (the ability to get the current system time will be in the next release, by popular demand).

Public production-quality releases of the entire system (including ports, or at least those managed by me personally) are done more frequently than other comparable systems. Hugo games run on as many if not more individual platforms than other comparable systems, and its implementation on a given platform is often more fully developed. TADS games will probably never run on a Palm device, or similarly small machine (TADS 3 in particular). The multimedia capabilities of Hugo (if that's your bag) are supported on more platforms than either TADS or Z-code games; Hugo is the only system that has a graphics-capable GUI interpreter for X11 or BeOS. A game can be written so that a single Hugo executable can degrade gracefully from a bells-and-whistles multimedia extravaganza on Windows or Macintosh to a clean and simple presentation on a Palm. My current work in progress is being developed on no less than four operating systems, and tested on five (including Palm). (Admittedly the Java Hugo interpreter is not yet ready for release; but in my opinion a browser is far from the ideal way to play any IF game.)

I don't know if you're referring to "big changes" in a positive or negative way. I'm not currently planning any radical rewrite of the language like TADS 2 --> TADS 3; I don't think it's necessary. I also don't know what additional major features I would add (to the language itself) at this point--that is, I don't know what major features it could be said to be lacking--but I'm always open to suggestions. There is a lot of work being done in doing new things with the language at a library/extension level. For instance, the source code for my work in progress has a large number of general and highly useful classes for handling advanced objects and behaviors. The language itself seems to be for the most part quite capable of handling whatever I want to throw at it on a source-code level.

My response will be a lot longer once I get off this Microsoft "Natural" Keyboard, but the short of it is that I think -- and I could very well be wrong -- that Hugo does not have a major revision coming soon which will add significant changes (improvements) to syntax and useability ala Glulx and TADS3.

I'm not overly aware what changes in syntax and usability Glulx adds, and I'm curious to see what some of the new features in TADS 3 end up translating into--but once again, if there are changes or improvements to be made to Hugo please let me know and we'll kick them around.

Kent

[Guest]

By "// in lines of text" I assume you mean (depending on the line) appending a '\' character if you need to carry something to the next line. This is a pretty rare occurrence. Earlier in Hugo's development, the compiler did not automatically continue certain kinds of lines (like blocks of text) for you. It has not been necessary for a very long time to append '\' to blocks of text which span multiple lines, but some existing source code out there may still do it.

You beat me to it. I went back yesterday and read some of the Hugo manual more carefully and was going to post something like – ‘well, on second reading it looks to me as if you’d rarely if ever have to use the “/”. Is that right?’ So I guess the question has been answered.

As for TADS being friendlier, I'm curious, since readability and clarity of source code have been tenets of Hugo's language design from the start.

I guess the “friendly” factor, in my case, had to do with Alan being the one language I know and Tads looking a lot like Alan. Tads verbs are handled in almost exactly the same manner, albeit with more complexity, as Alan. So looking at adv.t I could immediately decipher the verbs. The Hugo libraries are not so readily transparent in any part, although they look less daunting to the uninformed (well this uninformed) than Inform’s. (uninformed, Inform. Is this a pun?)

As for stability, I think "stable” was the wrong word to use. What I actually wondered was how likely it is that Hugo will change in the next few years to make it necessary for programmers to do a fair amount of relearning and make games written in an older version unplayable on older versions of interpreters. The former is happening, I know, for Alan, Tads and even Adrift and I think the latter is true in all three cases also. But I think you answered that too.

The problem with the interpreters is maybe mostly aesthetic. (And mostly to me) Players have to download different sorts of interpreters anyway, the old ones will be available and games can even be bundled with the appropriate interpreter in various ways, but do games requiring older interpreters seem old, not “state of the art”? Does it matter? For Tads 2 I just don’t know that it would feel right to be working with an “obsolete” version. A ridiculous thing to say probably given that text adventures are obsolete to begin with.

Hugo is intriguing if only because two of my favorite games in my short experience of IF – Fallacy of Dawn and Guilty Bastards -- are Hugo games. The language also, obviously, has a lot of support from its author. I do think Hugo would benefit from someone doing a tutorial, unless there’s one around I don’t know about since I think it is easier to learn from a tutorial in conjunction with a manual rather than just a manual.


Eric

[Eric]

Uh Oh. Not enough coffee yet. I guess if you post as a guest you can't edit the reply naturally. Well, least I signed it.

Eric

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I noticed that I was always being logged out over on Groucho. I deleted my cookie there and logged back in. Seemed to do the trick.

Regarding a Hugo tutorial: This directory <http://mirror.ifarchive.org/indexes/if- ... mples.html> and, er, it's equivalents have a file there called ScavHuntFull.zip by Gilles Duchesne. It's a pretty solid tutorial for the Hugo language. I'm sure that Gilles would be delighted to hear your (everyone's) take on it. I thought it was pretty good when I was looking through it.

[Eric]

Thanks. I somehow missed this tutorial entirely and forgot about Vault of Hugo to boot. Thus far I have managed to play the tutorial game. Great start eh?

Eric