(various strong points of WorldClass deleted)
: Are these things important enoguh to spend the cycles on them? I think
: they could make for interesting new twists in adventure games. They also
: cut down on the amount of ad hoc code you need to write, which in my view
: is a wonderful thing.
Hm. Well I could just interject here to mention that my extremely
vaporous game in progress implements *most* of the things you've described
here, through ugly hacks to adv.t. My code is as non-elegant as you
can get (especially compared to WorldClass, which is frankly very
nice code. Especially, I'm sure, the bits that I simply don't understand
:) but it works and, most importantly for me, it does so without the
heavy speed penalty that WorldClass invokes. (mainly because it follows
the adv.t tradition of assuming that if an object ain't in the room
with you then it's out of bounds for most verbs and thus the game doesn't
spend yonks traversing the object tree)
So I guess my point is, I'm happy dealing with ugly messy hacks (mainly
since I wrote them and thus more or less understand them) if it allows
me to play my game on my Mac Plus in the corner, which was my development
system until this January. I think either route is perfectly fair - it
just depends on your own priorities in the game. (but I'm probably
not going to want to release my source mainly because I'm, well, kinda
embarrassed at how hideous the code is.) I feel perhaps it also depends
on where you're coming from. You're obviously a very good programmer,
so you've built a very strong and self-consistent model for you to create
your world within, and you're willing to pay the CPU price for it. I,
however, am not a very good programmer and am more interested in writing
what I hope will be a reasonably interesting game that's still playable
on some (though unfortunately certainly not all) older machines. And
if I ain't got a self-consistent model, oh well! It's the story and the
game that are important to me.
But I certainly concede your second point. Which can be amply proved
by the fact that your game is finished and mine, 3 years later, is not.
Anyway, I should shut up. It's easy for me to ramble on like this when
I've never shipped anything for public consumption!
- Neil (my game is nothing but special-case code) K.