hadeishi@husc7.HARVARD.EDU (Mitsuharu Hadeishi) (05/15/87)
Hi folks, just finished porting AdvSys to the Amiga. It's a bare-bones port, but it works; I took a UNIX port that was sent to me and twiddled the input/output routines a little to speed up console output. It is fast and runs quite well. I will make it available by anonymous ftp via the local machine when time permits. Some comments about AdvSys: I've written adventure parsers before (AmigaVenture 1.17 was the last one I've written, it was of all things written in AmigaBasic, but it did work pretty well), so I notice some of the technical shortcomings before others. Of course, these will be easy to fix since AdvSys source is available. (I didn't need to change anything but the terminal I/O, so any changes I make can be easily back-ported to the MS-DOS AdvSys). The system does not do "in-context" parsing. That is, the interpreter cannot ask a question and get a short answer; the user has to re-type the whole thing. I consider this a major shortcoming, since it makes user-interpreter interaction quite stilted and unnatural. (Needless to say, AmigaVenture was a full- fledged interactive parser with "in-context" parsing.) AdvSys does not support objects inside each other, calculation of weight, size, and checks to see if the player is carrying too much, etc. Similarly it does not support checking to see if there are too many objects on, in, etc. something. This is something my AmigaVenture does quite thoroughly, for example, and would be a natural extension to AdvSys. The question is, of course, whether it should be added via hard-code or written in an extension to the AdvSys language. Interpreted code has the advantage of being much easier to debug but slower, of course, but adding all these features to AdvSys would probably be cumbersome unless supported extensively by language primitives. -Mitsu