That is true, but shouldn’t the comparison go beyond what can be found in the respective manuals anyway? I suppose each system that allows conversation at all will have an example of basic conversation in its documentation.
The interesting things appear when the system is pushed beyond what the system authors had envisaged - hence in my proposal the indefinite number of flowers, the slate that can effectively be named by the user, the dog that remains visible from a distance, the commanding from an adjacent location, et cetera. Those are much less likely to be found in the standard documentation, and may help IF authors to understand how to tweak any given system and to choose between systems.
That remains true even from my point of view. On the one hand having a complex object will show to what extent the authoring systems themselves allow modularising - breaking up its definition in useful discrete units; on the other hand the game should probably have some “one-behaviour objects” to help evaluating systems that do not allow it (well).
But it will not add much to what is already in the various manuals.
Another issue here is size. The more points of comparison one wants, if each point involves a different object, the more objects the game must needs have.
I am fascinated by all this talk of a CoD 2, and I whole heartedly agree with it, but I’m not sure everyone is on the same page regarding what it is CoA was supposed to actually DO.
I was under the impression that it was a test for systems, rather than a showcase for IF. A simple game which covered lots of niceties, and the gist was: if system X is capable of generating a CoD, it’s capable of generating complex adventure games. Just like “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” - if your font can handle every character, it can be used in a full-length novel.
Same cave-ats apply to my example, though. In a novel you’d want punctuation, and maybe accented characters. In an IF game you’d want other things. But the basic mechanics are there.
I think it’s interesting that CoD2 is more geared towards showcasing abilities of IF, and possibly their respective system, than towards actually proving whether a system has the mechanics to create a bare-bones quality piece of IF. After all, no one is making new IF languages, not really, not in a way that’ll surpass the established languages, let’s not pussyfoot around it. It is indeed more interesting to now look at all the features of a bare-bones game and use them to showcase them to the non-IFing crowd.
But in the end, it helps to remember what CoD was for.
…am I too late with these points? I know the discussion has advanced a lot, and I may be sketchy on my “facts” regarding what CoD was supposed to be. If, like my latest blog post, I’m behind the times, apologies.
Well, think of it this way: as CoD1 was an exhibition of most things a beginning IF author would want to know how to code in 2000 or so, so is the new CoD supposed to reflect what a new author might need to code nowadays. Did I say that clearly enough?
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.
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?
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.
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.