I think it is also important to remember that this is targeted towards someone coming in who is unfamiliar with most or all of the languages. Whilst it is important to demonstrate how to do more complex things (pushing the limits of the authoring system), I think it is also important to show how to do some of the more fundamental things too.
I had envisioned CoD2 being used alongside CoD1, so it wouldn’t need the basics (hence why I don’t like that question 5 was asked.) If it’s intended to be a whole replacement then it should have the basics too.
I always understood CoD as a Rosetta stone of IF languages - “given a certain design, what does the implementation look like in system A, B or C?”
The point (for me) is not so much to check what systems can do or not, and certainly not having a repository of code to borrow from, but as a side by side comparison of systems.
There’s actually a site called rosettacode.org devoted to these things, btw.
Yes. But it could evolve into CoD I as the Rosetta stone for standard code, and CoD II one for non-standard code.
How do different systems to this or that? → CoD I
How can different systems be tweaked? → CoD II
If you want to do something special, you want to choose a system that allows you to go beyond what the makers envisioned in the way that you want. CoD II could help you choose the appropriate system.
Campbell’s assessment of “what CoD is supposed to do” is the one closest to what I thought it was, and has a pedagogical ring to it. I like it.
Each person that posted after me had a slightly different take on the subject, even though the core was essentially the same: “showcase basic inner workings of IF”. To whom, or for what purpose, may not be extremely important at this stage, but then again it might. If our purpose is to do X, then we’ll do so-and-so. If we instead want to do Y, we’ll be doing this-and-that instead - even if, to the untrained eye, all we’re doing seems to be Z anyway.
Personally, I’d like to see CoD 2 replace the first one, besides adding whichever tasks and capabilities it adds. The pages for the first one haven’t been touched in years. For some of the languages, this means that their descriptions are full of dead links, giving the impression that no one still uses them. For me, part of the benefit of doing a CoD 2 is the fact that we or someone will be able to maintain the pages.
I take it Roger doesn’t frequent these parts any more?
I can’t say, but I e-mailed him about updating some links a couple years ago and he replied that he was no longer updating it.
Like some have said, I think CoD 2 should cover what new authors most likely would use in their games, including conversation. While there are games that use ASK/TELL well to this day, I feel the average new author is more intrigued by menu-based conversation or simple “TALK TO” systems. While covering menu-based conversations would be great in my book, that kind of thing is usually covered by library extensions so it’ll basically become an exercise in including extensions, which may or may not be a bad thing. If it is a bad thing, maybe we should just do a TALK TO conversation with very specific conversation rules.
I think the code-comparison aspect is very important to CoD, but even as far as that goes, some effort has already been started by David Welbourn over at the IF wiki to replace CoD. Unfortunately, I find it hard to navigate the wiki sometimes (there are also pages devoted to code examples and even syntax, I believe), but the nice thing is that, being a wiki, they can be as extensive as we’d like to make them.
I think one danger with a CoD type project is in each system there are often multiple ways to accomplish the same things. So if you have a sample game where you made an IF structure, why didn’t you make it an else or case-switch? Or you could have done conversation with some simple task or you could have drawn up a complex response table. Is there a danger in a CoD2 that we’re inferring the preferred way to do x is a specific way?
?? Does that change anything?
Well, when somebody separates two statements with ‘Or’, it often means that it could be one or the other and they aren’t sure how best to characterise it, so it’s kind of important to include both statements when quoting; otherwise, you end up creating an impression of certainty that wasn’t there in the original.
I was highlighting that Dave didn’t seem to like the fact that there were multiple ways of doing the same thing. I don’t think the Or in the statements above changes this, and so wasn’t relevant for the point I was making.
Yes. Or, no.
You have completely misunderstood my point. The way I read that, the Or relates to the former part of the first statement (Dave had trouble understanding), not the fact that there are multiple ways of doing things. My point was highlighting the latter part of the sentence given Dave’s comments above, and therefore the Or (which essentially reiterates the latter part of the first statement) is completely irrelevant. Yes, Or yes, if you like.
I agree that what the ‘Or’ refers to is ambiguous, and could be interpreted the way you have, but the way you quoted it, removes that ambiguity, so I felt it was (perhaps unintentionally) an unfair quote. Have you considered that duodave might not have actually meant what you thought he meant? Shouldn’t we just assume that duodave’s views are self-consistent, if they can be read that way? Wouldn’t that make more sense?
Fair enough, it wasn’t meant to be a misrepresentation, just an interesting contradiction.
Touche, Campbell.