Hi Dark, Precisely my point. As we discussed a few months back on the Audio Games forum a parser doesn't have to necessarily be overly complex to be effective. In fact, the less commands the better and less confusing it should be. One doesn't have to have a "grab," "get," and "take" command which all essentially do the same thing. Simply typing "take item" and being consistent with that will reduce confusion. Plus if a command like "smell" isn't going to b used there is no sense in adding it if the only message you will get back is "you smell nothing unusual here."
As far as combining items such as creating a grappling hook I'd probably use a command like "join rope and hook" which not only makes sense but is far easier than "tie rope on hook" or "tie rope to hook" etc. A "join" command or "combine" command could be used to join or combine any two items together to create another special item. As long as it is documented and the parser sticks to that convention no problem. The problem I've found with ZCode games is that there are so many different commands that its difficult to figure out which one the author chose to use for that particular action. Is it "in fireplace," "enter fireplace," or "north." You just don't know until you try all the possibilities. If a command like "in" is used then it should be consistent and we should not come along and have to use "enter" when encountering a similar situation later on. In short, consistency is the key. As far as puzzles goes my philosophy is to keep it simple stupid so to speak. That is the puzzle should be logical and make sense in a real world context. If we have a text adventure where you type "climb rope" and it says something cute like "you are unable to climb this rope right now" you would have to think about that problem logically. Well, if you have a big sword in one hand and a shield in the other you might have to type "sheath sword" and drop the shield in order to use both hands to climb the rope. After all, you can always climb back down and get your shield later in the adventure. However, as puzzles goes a person should figure it out without a huge leap of logic. Cheers! On 9/2/12, dark <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi tom. > > As I have said before, eamon really got it right I think in terms of puzzles > > by simply limiting the item manipulation commands to obvious ones. For > instance, you'd not be stuck trying to work out how to tie a rope onto a > hook, whether it's tie rope, tie rope with hook, knot rope on hook or > whatever, simply use rope, or possibly use rope on hook will be more than > enough, so I'll be interested to see what you can come up with. > > The business with the nazies is just the sort of puzzle I like too, sinse it > > makes sense and doesn't take a huge amount of guessing, indeedd in the Eamon > > game thror's ring there is a similar puzzle with a large chunk of mythrill > and a mine cart. You can only pick up the mithrill if you drop all your > other items sinse it is too large, ---- and there is a mine cart in the > other room. > > So all you need to do is get the cart, drop your gear, pick up the mythril, > > put it in the cart, then pick your stuff back upp, ---- perfectly logical > and quite doable if you just look around (indeed the solution was obvious to > > me once I found the mine cart). > > beware the grue! > > Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
