Iron ChIF: Pilot Episode (Audience Commentary)

[Dissolved]

@FLACRabbit

I wonder what kind of Europan aliens Draconis is imagining. Fish? Squid? Sea cucumbers?

…Sea snails?

@FLACRabbit

Or maybe they originated from elsewhere, like the robots in Code of the Lifemaker, which would explain how they could be humanoid and have a language.

Space colonisation surprise.

In most science fiction, you colonise space; in Endymion, space colonises you.

@otistdog

Despite all of the work done during planning, the question of how to handle beta testing never came up. (The irony!)

Well, I certainly hope neither Draconis or Pacian forgot an obvious element in their plans…

@improvmonster

dialog leaves it entirely up to the programmer what’s described and what isn’t. unlike ZIL and inform6 (i’m not sure about inform7 and i don’t remember what TADS does) everything is initially ‘scenery’ by default. the programmer takes responsibility for describing everything in the room either in the room description itself or with an (appearance) predicate.

RE: TADS 3—for default Things (i.e. portable objects), you’d have to either use a specialDesc (the equivalent of an appearance predicate; initSpecialDesc is the equivalent of an ‘is pristine’) or set isListed to nil to prevent listing. Fixtures (i.e. non-portable objects) aren’t listed by default.

@improvmonster

($ attracts $) defines “floating objects”, that is, items that can be in more than one place at a time (similar to the “found_in” property in inform).

Or TADS 3 MultiLocs.

@Draconis

Plus, the alias system I built is extensible to any other absurd words I might add in a burst of final-day sadistic cruelty. I was assuming the Å-machine trimmed dictionary words to the first few letters like the Z-machine (in both of these cases, midway through the second syllable); it turns out, it does not!

You aren’t going to do a Z-machine release of the game, then? Better break out the C64 emulators…