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Re: [kidsgames] Story based games???



Erik wrote:
> This programming language holy war is getting idiotic. 

Quite.  

But on a practical note, while you guys are discussing how
to implement a game for kids, please remember something --
speed _does_ matter, because kids are often using older, 
hand-me-down equipment.  (e.g., my kids are still using 
a 486).  Older games run fine on these machines, so it's 
worth it.  

Ultimately, though, the language choice should 
be that of whoever leads code development, regardless
of what biases might be involved in the decision.  
People do for free what _they_ want to do, not what I want 
'em to, and anyone who wants to do that has my respect, 
thank you. :)

If the game has so much overhead that it must run on a newer
machine, then it winds up on _my_ machine, and my kids don't
get much time on it.  I think this is a pretty common situation
for people with kids (unless they are very well off).

Anyway, it's just a suggestion. I don't make language 
recommendations because I basically always program in C.  
I like the ability to define new numerical datatypes (=classes)
in C++ (I do a lot of numerical programming), but I've 
heard so much bad press about C++ that I've
begun to think there's no point in learning it.  I wonder 
if the operator overloading features exist in other 
languages? (I understand that Java actively avoided this 
feature). Of course, C++ doesn't really give you full control 
over the operators.  Since you all know more languages than 
I, perhaps you might have suggestions.

I'm learning LISP because so much AI work has been done using it, 
but Yuck! It's really ugly -- so far I HATE it. :) I think it's
more the _look_ of the code than the logic that bothers me, though
both seem pretty alien.

Oh, BTW, I assume you know about:
XZip - a Z-machine interpreter.
Version 1.7 by Andrew Plotkin (erkyrath@netcom.com).
Based on ZIP Version 2.0 by Mark Howell.
Plays Z-machine files of versions 1-5 and version 8.

which interprets the old Infocom story files (I have a copy
of "The Lost Treasures of Infocom" installed on my system
using this to interpret the games.  It works fine except
for the ones that had graphics modules).  Presumeably, it
could be extended.  The parser is (I think) a bit smarter
than the early Sierra graphics/text games (Like "King's
Quest III").  Of course, more modern games are point-
and-click, which is easier, but sometimes less creative.
I really liked the "Monkey Island" interface, which used
a sort of controlled-grammar text input, where you selected
from an on-screen set of nouns and verbs to form
sentences.  That solved the synonym problem that always
made the old text games so frustrating to me, by
telling you up front what the parser would understand.

Terry

-- 
Terry Hancock
hancock@earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~hancock/index.html

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