by Eric » Sat Jun 28, 2003 1:24 pm
Roody_Yogurt wrote:Well, that is sort of funny for a couple reasons, the first being that you were always such a strong proponent of non-Big Three systems catered to non-programmers and the second being that you've chosen to go to Inform while several of us here are trying to follow Robb's footsteps and put out some Hugo games (well, my personal reason is more just that Hugo seems like a very capable system and I have a soft spot in my heart for underdogs).
I've just messed around with Inform for a couple weeks. I ripped off a lot of code that I don't even understand. What was irking me was that every system I've tried keeps relentlessly changing. It maybe isn't a huge issue that the games become harder to play, requiring someone to find the right old interpreter but my having to relearn the language is a pain. Alan started heading toward a new, incompatible version while I was in the middle of writing a game. Adrift changes every two weeks. Tads 2 will still be around, but let's face it, it's becoming last year's model. Then too, it is really easy to just lay out locatons and elementary stuff in any language because, after all, that's what they're designed to help you do. After that, though, the real difficulty starts. So maybe my ambition ought to be a ridiculously simplistic game in every language thus saving me from ever having to tackle any actual programming.
There was a minicomp announced on the Adrift Board for 15 kb games. To see how quick that might be done I tore up an old story and stuck it here and there into the Adrift generator. After I was done, you can output text from Adrift, which I did, getting a textfile of objects, locations etc and thought, well, why not just plug in Inform code? Because Adrift does things simply and the game, such as it was, had been pretty much reduced to its simplest format to fit into 15 kb. An interesting question is how much can you pare a game down without damaging it? Interesting to me, at least, because it's also the question of how little programming you need.
Alan is way simpler than Inform. Overall. It enabled me to learn a little about programming. But used for the most basic things, I'm not sure it is really any easier than Inform and if I'm only using Alan simplistically, to do stuff that's just as simple in Inform,then why not use Inform since far more people wlll download an Inform game from the archive?
Hugo I should probably look at again since it struck me as too much like Inform. However, I fear I am an eternal dabbler.
[quote="Roody_Yogurt"]Well, that is sort of funny for a couple reasons, the first being that you were always such a strong proponent of non-Big Three systems catered to non-programmers and the second being that you've chosen to go to Inform while several of us here are trying to follow Robb's footsteps and put out some Hugo games (well, my personal reason is more just that Hugo seems like a very capable system and I have a soft spot in my heart for underdogs).
[/quote]
I've just messed around with Inform for a couple weeks. I ripped off a lot of code that I don't even understand. What was irking me was that every system I've tried keeps relentlessly changing. It maybe isn't a huge issue that the games become harder to play, requiring someone to find the right old interpreter but my having to relearn the language is a pain. Alan started heading toward a new, incompatible version while I was in the middle of writing a game. Adrift changes every two weeks. Tads 2 will still be around, but let's face it, it's becoming last year's model. Then too, it is really easy to just lay out locatons and elementary stuff in any language because, after all, that's what they're designed to help you do. After that, though, the real difficulty starts. So maybe my ambition ought to be a ridiculously simplistic game in every language thus saving me from ever having to tackle any actual programming.
There was a minicomp announced on the Adrift Board for 15 kb games. To see how quick that might be done I tore up an old story and stuck it here and there into the Adrift generator. After I was done, you can output text from Adrift, which I did, getting a textfile of objects, locations etc and thought, well, why not just plug in Inform code? Because Adrift does things simply and the game, such as it was, had been pretty much reduced to its simplest format to fit into 15 kb. An interesting question is how much can you pare a game down without damaging it? Interesting to me, at least, because it's also the question of how little programming you need.
Alan is way simpler than Inform. Overall. It enabled me to learn a little about programming. But used for the most basic things, I'm not sure it is really any easier than Inform and if I'm only using Alan simplistically, to do stuff that's just as simple in Inform,then why not use Inform since far more people wlll download an Inform game from the archive?
Hugo I should probably look at again since it struck me as too much like Inform. However, I fear I am an eternal dabbler.