how could I do dynamic parsing? Inform 6 or TADS or what?

[matt_weiner (matt w)]

@VictorGijsbers

It wouldn’t just be simpler to have rules that change the actual properties of things, rather than have rules that change their descriptions? In your example, for instance, you could have pushing the button simply change the colour of all the things in the world, and you would have no parser problems. (I can imagine that there are scenario’s in which this solution doesn’t work well or doesn’t work fast enough.)

That certainly would be simpler in this case, but I’m somewhat quixotically envisioning something where that probably wouldn’t be practical. Something like “If it is late afternoon and the item is metallic and there is a window mapped west of the location, now the elaborate name of the item is ‘shiny [elaborate name of the item]’” and a bunch of similar things. The idea would be to have procedural generation of text that has enough variety that it wouldn’t get monotonous for the reader even after many such generations, and that matters enough to the gameplay that you can interact with it.

(I mentioned the project a bit more here. That thread reminds me that “Objects Matching Snippets” would probably have taken care of the example I posted, and that Ron posted an I6 fix for a previous attempt at this that I of course don’t understand.)

Definitely quixotic, as I said, but it seems like it might be fun for me to try it. I like platformers, so my idea of fun must include banging my head on my desk in frustration. On which note, I guess I need to go learn some I6.

Or TADS, maybe. RealNC, can the words that you add to an item’s vocabulary be variables? That is, instead of adding ‘purple’ to the vocabulary of the block, could I carry out some rules for determining the appearance of the block and add the resulting strings to the vocabulary of the block?