[kidsgames] Generic adventure game engine

["Horst H Lindner Jr" <scubah@tampabay.rr.com>]

I came into this discussion fairly late, who is trying to organize the
generic game engine?  I used to love the old text based adventures and still
have a copy of the Infocom treasury somwhere in the house.  If you just want
a way to create a generic way of creating new adventures the program should
be fairly easy, the hardest part of the whole program would be a graphical
interface for creation of the adventure.  But if you want to do somthing
like this you need a template of what you are creating to tell how complex
you want it to be.  Example:

1) How complex should the text parser be?  Natural language such as "Take
the hammer and hit the door with it" or the old simple version such as "hit
door with hammer"?
2) How do you create a adventure?  Trying to create an engine that was ALL
in text would be hard on the people creating the adventure, a graphics
interface where you could create items (hammer, locked door 1, tree, gem
etc.) and interactions such as "hit tree with hammer" "hit nail with hammer"
"hit chest with hammer" would be good.  You would also be able to use the
interface to create scenes, connections between scenes and the initial items
in each scene.
3) Do you need conversion routines for other game engines (for example
adventure is a game engine that loads various different text adventures for
unix systems) so it can use older games that are free?
4) What kind of storage structure are you storing the games in?
5) Do you want it extensible into a more complex game like the old nethack
under unix systems perhaps with better graphics?  This would add lots more
complexity to the system.

Just saying I want to build a generic adventure engine is easy but WHAT KIND
and HOW COMPLEX and adventure engine do you want?  If it is only the size of
the old "hit tree with hammer" type and if you can figure out how to input
the adventure in text format instead of a graphical one it shouldn't be that
hard to create but will be harder to create the adventures themselves, if it
is more natural language and has a spiffy graphical interface to create the
graphic adventure it could get more complex.  If you want it extensible to
somthing like nethack it will be very complex and quite interesting to
create.

If you every want this to get off the ground DEFINE IT.

Horst Lindner Jr

Motto
"Tests are a gift.  And great tests are a great gift.  To fail the test is a
misfortune.  But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and somthing
worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune.  If you think it is not your test
or you  think it is wrong that is one thing, maybe that is the test.  But if
it's only fear of failure--you have not the right to refuse the gift for
that.


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