That is close to, if not exactly what i attempted by merging the use of the quip-based extension and reading the player’s command. The issue with that, is that while it’s theoretically feasible, the sheer amount of fiddling to make sure disambiguation, if not outright recognition work, quickly made it more of a ‘maybe later’ proposition.
It -is- possible. But the question is whether you actually do want something that involved, because (to me, at any rate) immersion is only a concern if the game actually is possible to implement without losing what little marbles you have left.
In essence, what you can do is have a table of assumed dialogue, a table of responses to said dialogue and ten times the thinking for each possible way to write the dialogue, by either regex checking or adding a bunch of individual synonyms for words. So again, as others said, it really would be a menu of options that is hidden, giving you your intended effect.
At the point of effort you are intending, you really might as well be working on how inform itself recognizes and processes input, -just- for your project.
No one so far has mentioned Graham Nelson’s and Emily Short’s proposal for a DialogueKit. Seems pretty exciting. Have there been any updates since Emily’s blog post last July 31?
I believe @zed has said it appears to be feature-complete in the repository, but is just lacking documentation. I think there’s also been an indication Emily Short might be working on an example, possibly even an example game?
April 28, the anniversary of Inform’s initial release, has historically been when big stuff has been released (last year it was when the big open source announcement happened) so I personally have my fingers crossed we’ll see something then, though of course that’s pure speculation.
I would hate to think I played a role in actual rumor-monging so I want to make as clear as I can: I follow Inform news closely, and I have heard nothing regarding the possibility of such a game, even aspirationally.
Ha, see, that’s the difference between a lawyer and a normal human being – I’m pretty sure what must have happened is I saw that exchange, noticed that Emily omitted the word “irresponsible” from her reply such that it became a simple statement of unfalsifiable fact, and thought to myself “well that sure seems like a winking acknowledgment that such a thing could be happening”.
The normal-human-being heuristics are probably better to follow here, though at least there’s a narrow area for hope
EDIT: I will say that she seems quite busy with her day job, from the couple Failbetter announcements I’ve seen.
“Inform is often, though generally quietly, used in the commercial games industry as a tool for rapid prototyping. This proposal aims to assist that use case, making dialogue prototyping much easier, and also opening the possibility that such a prototype dialogue system could go on to be used in the resulting production game. Since Inform is now able to compile C code and link into large game programs written in, say, C# or C++, previous technical obstacles to this have now been removed.”
I’ve heard of Twine being used for prototyping work, but this is the first time I’ve heard mention of game studios using Inform for that purpose. Also, the possibility that the game studios could literally compile the dialog into C code and use them directly in their finished product is fascinating to me.
Yeah she has Mask of the Rose which was delayed for polishing, the end of the tracklayers city arc which is something fallen London players have been waiting for for over a year and is a lot of work, and her Choicescript game Platinum Package is appearing on the Coming swoon pages again after disappearing for years. She also recently expressed that personal events have occurred which make working harder (I think; maybe a death in the family, can’t remember.
So I definitely wouldn’t expect a hidden Inform game coming out nowhere. Could happen but it would be wild!
I am currently collaborating on a game (planning stage) and one of the ideas we have come up with is a hybrid system.
EXAMPLE:
~>Talk to bartender
You quickly engage in a conversation with the bartender. What do you want to ask about? [pick a number or type any text to ask about it, e.g. POLICE]
How is business?
Have you seen Mr. Myagi?
Bye, that’s all for now.
~>red planet
The bartender starts to tell a looong story about how she ended up on Planet Red.
What else would you like to ask about?
~>3
You say goodbye and turn away from the bartender.
Also want to add an example where the “topic”-approach worked very well in a main stream adventure game: Mean Streets from 1989 was a graphic adventure but when you were questioning people you had to type keywords and note down keywords. It is similar to ASK JOHN ABOUT TOPIC except you don’t have to type “ASK JOHN ABOUT”.
I like “talk to” where you don’t specify a topic, or I like listed options, or using a keyword-style approach. I did the keyword thing in one of my games. Once you were talking to a character, it worked something like Twine, where certain words showed up in a different color. But instead of clicking those words, you typed them to advance the conversation. (The player can also adjust the keyword style so that, instead of making the keywords a different color, the game sets off the keywords with symbols, etc.)
