by redle » Thu, 15Aug06 01:51
@me3
I'm no Adrift expert, but from what I have seen of the inner workings of its games, the engine chooses its own suggestions. There is no way to tell the engine, "Hey, I want you to give special preference to the word 'elephant' if someone types its beginning letters." In other words, suggesting that auto-complete could fill in character names for the player, while a good idea, is something outside the game maker's control. It would be a suggestion for Adrift itself.
@whomever
Personally, I agree with the idea that all letters/symbols needed within a command-line game such as this one should exist within the language of distribution. I did argue for it a bit when I first started helping on this project. Don't get me wrong, I fully understand Serge's desire to keep character names unchanged. People's names are their names, regardless of where they travel. Where alphabets differ, though, it isn't that uncommon to try to maintain pronunciation rather than printed representation (An extreme example would be names changing from Mandarin to any of the Latin based alphabets. There's just no question, a change is required). In the end, the concession was made that aliases were added for each name using English-only letters.
The trickiest part, I find, is that characters aren't actually listed during an examination of the room. It can be rather difficult to figure out exactly who is present at any given time. If the room listed them while looking around, at least there would always be a way for players to get a character's name onto the screen so that it became possible to click on it for entry.
All that said, I'm not sure I've yet encountered a place in this game where I was required to type any character's name except when that name showed up as part of a bold suggested command. And, yes, these "suggested commands" are a bit different. Adrift has basically 2 different interpretation modes. In the first, it knows of specific individual words:
action words: east, open, climb, take
objects: desk, ball, hammer
characters: Steve, Lucy, Peter, Helen
whatever... it knows individual words and tries to interpret any sentence entered and figure out how it makes sense within the current game. The second is that full commands can be stored within the game. These commands are not interpreted like the first example. These commands are directly compared (what was typed versus what is stored). They must match. If they do, code is processed. There are things that can be done to allow a bit of flexibility in matching sentences of the second type. But I will remind people that this is predominately a translation being done. Adding such flexibility is more a coding side. (Once again, not saying it can't be done. Just trying to point out why some extra challenges may exist within the game that users will just need to accept than might be expected if such a game originated in English)
@serge
Don't take too much to heart some of the critiques. I, myself, am certainly not always the most diplomatic in my phrasing. Many times there are valid points/suggestions buried within complaints. People point out what causes them frustration or make the playing a bit more difficult for them. Word choices often come out even more harsh because the person is actively struggling with the problem at that very moment. We've all been a little bit rude or impolite to someone who was totally undeserving at some point or other simply because we haven't figured out a solution to a tricky problem (not to mention, sometimes we just don't think it all the way through before we speak).
@Rexxx
I agree it is a bit atypical. To me it plays much more like a TADS game hidden inside the Adrift engine. For good or bad it has its own unique feel.
