Re: Limitations of Inform and TADS?


5 Nov 1995 20:53:53 -0800

dleary@trout.ab.umd.edu (David Leary) writes:

>(Dave: this is NOT a flame of Legend. I've seen pieces of the code, and
>I know darn well that you were pushing the limits of both TADS 2.0 and
>the machines you were working on. You did what you could with what you
>had, and I think if the people on the group knew everything that was
>going on inside that monster of yours, they'd be a lot more forgiving of
>the two-second delay between turns...)

Can Dave enlighten us as to what, exactly, was going on in the code? As
I've stated before, the reason that I found the delay so frustrating was
that I didn't see anything in the game that seemed to require more
CPU time than, say, the things that were going on in Unkuulian II.
If the NPCs in Legend seemed unusually alive, or if there were a
lot of complex interactions going on, I'd understand what was
causing the delay--but as I said earlier, Legend seemed to have
more text than the average text adventure, but I couldn't see
what was requiring all of the CPU time.

I'm particularly curious because if that two second delay was justified,
I must have missed out on a lot of neat stuff in Legend, and I'd better
go back and take another look at it.

-Jacob Weinstein