Anyway, I'm having trouble programming for my first (maybe last, depends
on if anyone likes it AND if I do or don't hate programming so much that
when I'm done I never want to write another Inform game again) game,
"And All the World a Stage," a surprisingly short story.
As far as programming goes, I don't intend to do anything that hasn't been
done before (I'm a writer, not a programmer, Captain). It would be
silly to recode stuff that's already been done.
I think that, in getting help from the net, I can in return help the net,
by becoming a compiler of segments of inform code. I think it'd be pretty
neat to make a shell with all of the common game elements, with INSERT
DESCIPTION HERE and INSERT FUNCTION HERE wherever it's needed.
I've begun with descriptions, using the description in shell.inf from the
examples directory, and will include the most excellent frobozzica code
to handle people's dialogue (but does it handle orders?), but that's hardly
everything commonly used.
What other things are there? I can think of the following:
doors, timed occurances, those nifty help menus, those nifty quotes that
appear, simple functional objects, enterable objects, those ending epilogues,
scoring, death/destruction, short messages when one walks through a
door the first time/all times...
Is that it? Too much? Did I miss some?
What I'd like to ask...and I beg, please don't ignore me...is, what else
do I need to have in this complete basic shell and could people send me
code snippets for each of the important things?
I will then stick them together and upload it to ftp.gmd.de for all to use.
Now I'm guessing, from the description of the designers' manual as a tutorial,
which isn't the same as a library, that this won't be found there, but
forgive me and inform me if it is...I still can't read the DM.
Thanks, and I hope to hear from you.
OH, I almost forgot. I have another nifty idea which I don't think is
required, but may be helpful. I want to have a place which one can
go to and then type, say, "library," and he'll step into the library.
How do you create directions other than north, south, etc?
-- -- If you can tolerate amateur poetry enough to do a SUCK/NOT SUCK poll, PLEASE check out http://grove.ufl.edu/~jeremy. (jeremy@grove.ufl.edu)