> I would assert the following: games should be optimized to death,
> written for the lowest possible CPU they can run on, and written
> efficiently. You'll reach the biggest possible audience by doing
> so. If the "low-end" machine for your game is a 486, well, them's
> the breaks. If it's a TRS-80, but the game is still fun - so much
> the better.
Quite so. Curses runs quite comfortably on a Psion Series 3a, which
is convenient: I can play it on the bus, or while watching TV.
There are other kinds of game that Inform can't do easily. For
example, a game where the NPCs had proper representation of knowledge,
where they would remember things that you had told them, and things
that you had asked them about, and behaved accordingly, perhaps
maintaining some kind of emotional state.
Another example (one which one of the programmers of the late Magnetic
Scrolls once played with) is a game in which things are more flexible;
where the landscape, objects and NPCs don't exist until you come
across them, at which point they are created, consistently with
everything that you've already seen.
If you want to write using some other language, then by all means do
so. If it produces a game which is interesting enough, then I'll play
it (on less portable hardware), but I'm not convinced at present that
Inform could be made dramatically easier to use by adding any fancier
features; it looks quite adequate for the kinds of games that it's
designed for.
If you write Zork-type games which require a 486, then I'm going to
wonder why.
I'm all for developing Inform and Z-code, however. I think it would
be interesting to redesign Z-code with the benefits of hindsight,
making it quicker to interpret, perhaps (this *is* an issue on some
machines which people want to use in playing games!), or adding some
features which are now practical. Or perhaps simply to compress text
better. But it doesn't seem compelling just at the moment.
-- Bruce Institute of Advanced Scientific Computation bruce@supr.scm.liv.ac.uk University of Liverpool http://supr.scm.liv.ac.uk/~bruce/