Okay not Okay (adv3Lite suggestion)

In the process of implementing a switch, I encountered the [report switch] message, which is, “Okay, you turn on the switch.” The word “okay” in this message strikes me as needlessly flip. It may be fine for a light-hearted game, but for something like a horror game it would almost certainly be distractingly wrong. I’m not writing a horror game – quite the opposite – but even so, I don’t care for it, because it feels like an active, conscious intrusion into the narrative by the game mechanism. The game mechanism ought, I think, to be more discreet than this.

On perusing the library messages in thing.t, I find that some [okay] messages don’t include the word “okay” in the output text, while others do. And again, the [report switch] message does include the word even though the word is not in the message key.

It appears that my next job is going to be to comb through thing.t, looking for all instances of “okay,” in order to build a CustomMessages object that omits the word. This will take a few minutes. For the next release, I’d suggest that “okay” be dispensed with entirely. (Making it optional would, I suspect, be more trouble than it would be worth.)

The messages you are looking for are implemented through Dmsg and Bmsg macros. The default messages are contained in the file tads3lite_msgs.csv that is included in the Adv3Lite Manual file collection (adv3Lite/docs/manual directory where you extracted the library files).

If you open this up in a spreadsheet (Excel or Open Office for example) it should make it easier to search and craft replacements for these messages.

Jerry

I can make the change(s) Jim suggests easily enough, but before I do so does anyone have any thoughts on these messages? I don’t want to take the ‘okays’ out of all these messages only to find that everyone but Jim loves them!

I tend to side with Jim on the use of Okay in these messages, but I’m neutral on whether you should take them out.

I find it easy enough to customize the messages to my liking, something I will do to some degree or another no matter what you settle on for a default. The process of doing so is easy and straightforward. Since there is so little burden involved in doing so, I’ll probably customize no matter what you come up with for defaults.

There is no way that you will be able to craft a full set of default messages that nobody will ever want to change. Even if I like all of your messages, I still like the idea of making the text my own.

My $.02.

Jerry

It turns out there are only six (unless I missed some – I searched for the string 'okay in thing.t). Here’s my CustomMessages object that gets rid of them, in case anybody else wants to borrow it.

CustomMessages messages = [ Msg(report switch, '{I} turn{s/ed} {1} {2}. '), Msg(okay wear, '{I}{\'m} now wearing {1}. '), Msg(okay doff, '{I}{\'m} no longer wearing {1}. '), Msg(okay get outof, '{I} {get} {outof dobj}. '), Msg(okay turn to, '{I} turn{s/ed} {1} to {2}'), Msg(okay set to, '{I} {set} {1} to {2}') ] ;