Re: Which system to pick?
5 Jul 1995 17:02:49 GMT
Gabe White (gwhite@freenet.columbus.oh.us) wrote:
: I'm new to writing IF, also. I tried TADS and Inform, but couldn't get
: anywhere. So I downloaded ALAN, and I'm having a little more luck with
: it..
: My question: What is ALAN lacking? Will it be worth the time to write a
: game in ALAN instead of trying to learn TADS or Inform? If I write a game
: in ALAN, will anybody be able to play it without also having ARUN?
I think, ALAN has no Daemons, its parser isn't quite as extendable and
there are no true variables and loops. But I think those will be needed
only in special situations (and I guess you can get a workaround usually
- though, of course, these situations will probably crop up somewhen if
you keep writing IF (and your games aren't always the same...). But then,
the programmers of ALAN promised to continue developing it... (it *did*
start with only a two-word parser).
And no, you cannot play games in ANY of the usual authoring systems
without the appropriate runtime program (at least, AFAIK). But this
shouldn't be too much of a problem, you can give the runtime with your
game - and people with different machines can then play your games, too,
if they're not coded into something machine-dependant, just by using
their appropriate runtime.
Ad Astra!
JuL
lerchj@hp.rz.uni-duesseldorf.de / Never disturb a dragon, for you will be
J"urgen ''JuL'' Lerch / crunchy and taste good with ketchup!