Any interest in new languages?


25 Jan 1995 03:25:17 GMT

Hello everyone,

I was glad to find this newsgroup; I thought that perhaps text adventures
had died with the advent of multimedia games like Myst or Seventh Guest.
It looks like they haven't!

I spent the last couple of years developing a language for writing adventure
games because I didn't know one existed (and also I wanted to try my own
parsing ideas). It is called Archetype; it is written in Turbo Pascal and
runs, so far, only on PCs.

After having downloaded the FAQ and reading about all the adventure languages
already out there, I was wondering: is there already a glut of these
languages or is anyone interested in still another?

Archetype is object-oriented, implementing inheritance and message passing.
(Its messages do not have arguments, an experiment of mine which seems to
have turned out well.) The programmer can extend the lexicon themselves,
and the parser operates on a wide variety of sentences without having to
involve the programmer in complicated part-of-speech analysis. Archetype
was designed to run adventure games, but the language is more general than
that, and much of standard Archetype is written in Archetype itself.

It is not LISP-based, but resembles Pascal with some distant inspiration
from HyperCard. The package includes two adventure games that demonstrate
its capabilities, a small demo adventure that includes source code, and
a complete reference manual.

If there is any interest, please email me or post to this group. I am
willing to give out the package free of charge so long as you let me know
how you liked it.

Thanks,

--Derek

email: dtj@rincon.primenet.com
dtj@socrates.ed.asu.edu

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Derek Jones
dtj@primenet.com
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