Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity.
I like to employ a form of repetition, in which the same elements recur but in different and unexpected ways. rather than being discarded as soon as they are understood or passed over.
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Eventually I found it had been working all along-but didn't show anything on screen until it had the first full page of text. I inserted 30 new lines, and suddenly my toy said 'hEllO woRlD'. An hour later I understood alphabet shifting rather better!
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A deliberate choice on my part was for the player to continue to find new possibilities in the early Attic rooms far into the game. I think this builds atmosphere, though it means there's no neat division of the prologue from the middle game.
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At the end of April I archived 'Curses' and Inform, and announced them on the newsgroups.
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Players very widely disagree with me about what's hard and what's easy. and in a way, 'I won, but it was a fight' is the best compliment a game can receive.
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By the new year of 1994, it had grown up into Inform 4 and could produce games twice as large.
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The most frequent complaint is that it's hard. True. it's a hard game to win Also, many people ask me how to use the secret debugging commands, apparently under the impression that I'll tell them.
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For a fortnight nobody at all emailed me, or posted a follow-up. Doesn't anyone care, I thought? It turned out my newsreader was broken, and hadn't posted at all.
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The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700.
Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity.
Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity.
Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity.
Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity.
Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity.
Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity.
Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity.
Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity.
Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity.
Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity.
Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity.
Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity.
Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity.
Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity.
Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity.
