Interactive Fiction goes Hi-Tech
A while back I was toying with the idea of a reinterpretation of the Sorcery Fighting Fantasy books. Even went as far as seeking official permission off Steve Jackson.. which was going well.. until a mobile phone game company bought the copywrite for sorcery and scuppered all the work.
Regardless, the inform code was quite simple.. but nevertheless it was still an excercise in painful coding... not any more.
Take a look at the latest version of Inform (version 7) which was actually reviewed in PC GAMER. It can take english sentences, and create all the code base from it..
A rough example.. switch it on, start a project and you can type something like
'The small red cherry is in the cardboard fruit box, which doe not have a lid. The small red cherry is sweet and tasy and smells wonderful. The cardboard box has a faint whiff of ripe fruit and feels a little damp.'
From this is create the two objects with appropriate sensory descriptions (tocuh box, feel box, smell cherry an so on), one as a container, the fact that the cherry fits, and the box cannot close.
So if you fancy creating a little interactive fiction of your own check out
and be as amazed as I was. Now imagine converting this codebase to a MUD code... and then buuld in speech recognitions.. you could create works of art as simple as an author dictates a new book.
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