Jolt Country

Hey, so I am in chat with Lysander tonight and he mentioned that Johnny was looking at some fight code (I would guess from A Crimson Spring). I wanted to throw out a message before I forgot: Johnny, let me know if you want to look at the fighting code in Necrotic Drift. It's a lot better, I think, and handles some stuff that ACS doesn't. (On the other hand, ACS does handle multiple "friendly" characters and ND does not.)

The fighting stuff I did is definitely not this awesome collection of anything, just something to look at and hopefully inspire other programmers to take it even farther and do bigger and better things. It's also very D&D based (roll for an attack, modify an attack, roll for damage, check armor class - that sort of thing).

That could be helpful. Sure.

And away we go!

http://www.joltcountry.com/chix/fight.hug

I ended up expanding it for Necrotic Drift, but the version above at least gives a programmer a good start for developing their own system, and/or a starting place to implement their own.

Thanks! As soon as I've hammered out the Mist Room code, and I'm ready to start on the NPCs, I'll take a closer look at this.

Say, you're dabbling with some Inform 7 stuff too, aren't you? How are you liking that language? I would love to dork around in it for a little while, it's just tough to grab a good block of time for it. I'm very interested in people's opinions, especially when they are not coming from the Usenet crazies.

You can never forget that it is a programming language. I mean, it's awesome what they're trying to do, but the main problem with trying to make a achine code that's just a seradable by machines as it is by humans is that human language is a lot looser and more open to interpritation than machine code is; so when in my head I want to say "the thing is an object with a description of 'blah'" and i type that and it doesn't work it takes me quite a while to realize that that's because what I need to say is "the room contains an object called blah. The thing has a description of 'blah'"--the error messages can't really explain this. Also the manual's kind of scattershot--chapters 2 and3 are good but then 4 starts babling about much more "atmospheric" effects that the novis programmer doesn't want to be fiddling with when he/she doesn't even know how to program an intro yet.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:Say, you're dabbling with some Inform 7 stuff too, aren't you? How are you liking that language? I would love to dork around in it for a little while, it's just tough to grab a good block of time for it. I'm very interested in people's opinions, especially when they are not coming from the Usenet crazies.

You know, you have access to the source code of a 50000+ word adventure written in I7.

Just saying.

Bruce

Yes. But if I read that, I will spoil the game. And rest assured, when I have my mouth agape and skin flush due to the new Stiffy Makane experience, it's going to be at first because I'm sitting there playing it.

But your point is well-taken, yes.

Most of the time I like I7's compromise between programming syntax and the readability of natural language. Usually I find myself able to sync up with the pecularities of its syntax well, but I totally understand that some people find that a hair-pulling experience. Overall, I find it can do some fun, cool things.

My main complaint has been legacy stupidity in some of the ways the underlying I6 library handles things (though one major one that I submitted as a bug, Graham fixed) and more importantly, the fact that the Standard Rules that form these behaviors (like all the default rules involving taking an object) are "invisible" in I7 -- they're written in some complex I7/I6 hybrid code which, outside of the IDE, sure you can look at, but you have to be both an I7 and I6 expert (or Graham) to understand. This is not often a problem, but occasionally I run into weird behavior and I'd like to know *exactly* what a standard rule is doing, so I could exactly modify it.

So it's been requested that the Standard Rules be "translated" into I7 form for the docs, which Emily Short has agreed would be a Good Thing, but it may be a ways off.

Anyway, I still have only doinked around with a lot, not made anything complete. So the proof in the pudding will come when I make a short entry for that HP Lovecraft comp/thingie.

EDIT: Wow, just after I bitch about it, the newest version of I7 (released today) features the default action rules translated into full I7 code. Huzzah!

There's an HP Lovecraft comp? What is this?

Here be the link

Here's a page with the Commonplace Book

The guy organizing it is encouraging people to keep their entries short & sweet, so there's still time to jump in.

Nevermind.