You have your text IF premium creators who create damn-near perfect content – and you have the rest of us who sometimes miss things. In writing any room description, your players will read what is shown in the description to figure out what to look at in more detail and/or where to go next, as expected.
A problem arises when you (as the writer) mention something in the room description that is not described further, leading to that dreaded “I see no XXXX here” when the player enters “EXPLAIN XXXX”. This is frustrating for the player because you *just* mentioned XXXX in your room description! Or a direction is mentioned in the room description but when the player tries to go that way, they get the confusing “You cannot go that way”.
What is needed is a tool that can help identify these items (noun phrases) and exits that, as the game writer, we overlooked in providing further information, even if it is (and usually is only) atmospheric descriptions (such as Decoration and Distant).
I took a crack at creating one. It looks for noun phrases and directions in the room description and then checks if those nouns can be eXamined and those directions actually exist. While it does produce some false positives (pointing out nouns where no further info is needed) and some false negatives (finding noun phrases that are not quite right), the directions seem clean. A little more tuning of the word lists would probably help.
This code runs quickly (about 3 seconds on the 180 room Colossal Cave) with most time spent writing the checkDescr.txt file.
For more details and the code, follow the link to the GitHub repo. Any suggestions or feedback is appreciated. Thanks!
Neat! Presumably a related next step could be to create something that takes a written room description and automatically generates code stubs for all the noun phrases mentioned, including automagic guesses about grammatical properties (plural, proper noun, etc), as well as extracting sentences that should be “initial object descriptions” rather than part of the room description? So, like, a deterministic NLP-assisted tool that automates the actual tedious/mechanical parts of authoring, rather than the creative parts?
I’ll look at this, having perchance already implemented perhaps the ultimate stress test: (warning: spoiler for Isekai !)
statstor: Room 'Stationery storage'
// answer to the challenge !
"You have expected, in a place inhabitated by Magi researchers, this place.\n
This small squarish room's shelves are crammed with reams of papers, bundles
of pencils, styli, quills, pens, brushes, bottles of ink and colours, tablets
of watercolour, pastel sticks, straightedges, compasses, protractors,
rulers... practically every tool conceived for writing, drawing, drafting,
sketching or painting prior of computers is stored here.\n
East you can return to the staircase." // yes, IS an Imp's challenge !!
east = tground
;
(yes, I fess up: I’m still mulling revenge for the non-costructive criticism of Creative Cooking, and I’m still tempted about locking up the hapless player in that location until s/he/y EXAMINE eyery object here !!)
