Well, I've designed my way around it. You'll have to wait until the game is released to find out how I did it.

(Which will probably never, ever happen, so you either have to wait until the game is released, or until it's officially cancelled, which will probably be in a week and a half.)

Pinback's idea does sound pretty cool, if it were possible.

Put a little birds-eye view map up on the top of the screen and have them use the arrow keys to drive a little red dot around accompanied by vrmm vrmmmm noises. Hey cool, it's Grand Theft Auto!

Well, if the player needs to travel on a course, and there isn't anything to do along the way, it might be better just to make it a cut-scene. Or make a verb like "travel to location" that describes the trip (not knowing what you have in mind, I'm not sure that would fit your design). If the player has freedom of movement, then about all a real-time event could do is describe things passed while driving (otherwise it might send them north when they had intended to turn around and go back).

I guess you could end the description in a keypress loop to accomplish the real-time, and then as soon as the player presses a key, end the loop so that it goes immediately back to the command prompt for them to start typing. I think the first keypress would get lost, though, and there wouldn't be any way to send them back into the keypress loop once the command prompt was up.

Hmm.

Then maybe this is more a question about game design. Let's say your player's in a vehicle of some sort, and you want to convey the sense of movement, but without having to have them type "n, n, n, n" to move up the road/path/whatever Or even "z, z, z, z". I just want to avoid that somehow. Cuz that's all lame and shit.

I dunno.

Vehicles, man. The IF author's enemy.

I did it in Breath Pirates too, although not for any timed puzzles. But that was a custom engine in QB. I don't think it can be done in Hugo, as it currently stands.........

The Pawn did that. Much like in the movie 'Big' when tom hanks has limited time time to input his move before the game kills him.



THE
I-F
AARDVARK

I'm not so sure, ICJ. I think that in order to do real-time stuff, you have to not actually be at a command prompt. Because when you're at a command prompt, the Hugo engine has complete control. Nothing at all is happening other than that prompt. When you see real-time stuff -- Hugo Tetris, for instances -- it's just in a keypress loop.

I'll be *really* shocked if there is some way to do this, and I'm just not thinking of it. I've thought about "faking" the input prompt with a keypress loop, but you'd have to be able to take the user's input and then send it *into* the Hugo engine for pre-processing. It seems like it would be fairly easy to change the Hugo engine so that there's a hook into the primary parser -- i.e., when the user types something and hits "enter", just have a Hugo command that would call the same routine in the engine by doing something like "EngineParse(string)".

Ok, I know it is possible to put real-time stuff into Hugo. I will research this tonight. I'd do it now, but I am going out for some birthday pinball. I was shaking my fist at "The Black Hole" last week and I want a rematch. But yeah, there is definitely a way to count seconds and so forth. Were you hoping to have the game interrupt the player with a move, though? (Did Border Zone do that?)

Is there a standard/easy way to put it into real-time mode, where, for instance, if there is no action after 5 seconds or so, it automatically issues a wait command or something?

Guys?