Re: Limitations of Inform and TADS?


5 Nov 1995 16:30:09 -0500

In article <47j7hb$j9o@usenet.rpi.edu>,
Damien Neil <damien@lugnut.stu.rpi.edu> wrote:
>On 5 Nov 1995 14:54:03 -0500, David Leary <dleary@trout.ab.umd.edu> wrote:
>>Leaving aside the obvious comment that the TRS-80 predates the Amiga and
>>the 286 by a few years, the fact is that a text adventure - in ANY
>>incarnation - should not need to draw on as many CPU-intensive processes
>>as a real-time, graphics-intensive game of ANY sort. If it does,
>>something's amiss.
>
>Justification? Rationale? If you're going to make an assertion of that
>size, I want to see the reasoning behind it.

You shrug off the I/O issues, but that's the foundation of my reasoning.
Other aspects common to both types of games don't generally hog the
machine quite so badly.

There are exceptions - I could see a sophisticated AI for an NPC being a
hog - but I stand by my general statement.

>Certainly, the I/O code of a text adventure will consume less CPU power
>than the I/O code of DOOM. The I/O is, however, the least important
>portion of a text adventure. If text adventures were nothing but DOOM
>without graphics, I'd never play one.

I agree, and my post was not a Doom vs. text adventure post. There's
nothing wrong with mindless violence, but that's not the kind of game *I*
want to write.

>>I would assert the following: games should be optimized to death, written
>>for the lowest possible CPU they can run on, and written efficiently.
>>You'll reach the biggest possible audience by doing so. If the "low-end"
>>machine for your game is a 486, well, them's the breaks. If it's a
>>TRS-80, but the game is still fun - so much the better.
>
>By this argument, all games should be written in assembly language. We
>should throw both Inform and TADS out the door, as both are clearly
>highly inefficient.

Not what I'd advocate, and if you look at the rest of my post, you'll see
that I don't. There's obviously a trade-off - ease of design/authorship
vs. speed. But a text adventure shouldn't (generally) require a 486.

>I own a 486/66 with 16MB of RAM. Much of the code I write and run on it
>(generally unrelated to IF) would not run on my old C64. Should I be
>ashamed of taking advantage of the resources at hand?

Absolutely not. My argument was about games in general, and IF in
particular. If you're doing serious number-crunching and you need a big
machine, fine. If you're writing Acme Soopur-Doohm (TM) in SVGA and you
need a 486, fine.

If you're writing a text adventure and it'll only run on a 486/66 with
16MB, I'd say something's wrong - maybe with the system you're using,
maybe with your own code, but something's wrong.

The original Unnkulia 1 was written on an Atari ST. I was more than
happy to move up to a 386 to write Unnkulia Zero - I had to, in fact,
because the ST wasn't "big" enough - but unless the technology changes
dramatically, I don't think you should ever need a Pentium to run a text
adventure.

If someone writes a game that both needs and justifies a Pentium, then
I'll be suitably impressed.

(Dave: this is NOT a flame of Legend. I've seen pieces of the code, and
I know darn well that you were pushing the limits of both TADS 2.0 and
the machines you were working on. You did what you could with what you
had, and I think if the people on the group knew everything that was
going on inside that monster of yours, they'd be a lot more forgiving of
the two-second delay between turns...)

-----
Dave Leary
(Nope, my views don't represent UMAB...good thing, huh?)

"I've been of thousand devils caught,
And thrust into that horrid place,
Where reign dismay, despair, disgrace." -- George Crabbe