>baf@max.tiac.net (Carl Muckenhoupt) wrote:
>>dmb@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett) writes:
>>
>>Squirt was the better puzzle, though. The mouse was flawed by the
>>"guess-the-syntax" aspect of the puzzle, not to mention the inconsistency
>>with Infocom command interpretation. (That is, you couldn't give the mouse
>>multiple commands on a line; "mouse, w. e" would parse as "mouse, w."
>>followed by "e", which is inconsistent with Enchanter, where you have to
>>give multiple commands to the turtle in yet another similar puzzle. I
>>wouldn't mind this so much if Inform didn't make such a big deal about its
>>Infocom compatibility. But I digress.)
> I may be way off here, but why do you mention inform? Doesn't Legend
>use TADS?
Yes, Legend uses TADS. I mention Inform because I'm talking about the
mouse puzzle that Dave compared to the Squirt puzzle in Legend. The mouse
puzzle is in Curses, which was written in Inform.
> In inform, you can type:
>mouse, go west then go east.
> which gets interpreted as two commands to the mouse. Unless the scope
>is changed, though, the mouse is gone by the second - i.e. it's equvalent to:
>> mouse, go west
>The mouse leaves west
>>mouse, go east
>I can't see the mouse here.
> Well, you get the idea.
Hmm, okay. I may be misremembering _why_ the command
>mouse, w. e
didn't work. It's still inconsistent with Enchanter, where the command
>turtle, se. get scroll. nw
emphatically did work, in a situation where
>turtle, se
>turtle, get scroll
>turtle, nw
produced some message like "The turtle can't hear you from here" after the
second command.
I begin to wonder, though: is Enchanter consistent with the rest of Infocom
in this regard? The only other game in which I can remember giving multiple
commands to actor is Suspended, in which actors never wentout of scope.
Whatever the case, the solution to the mouse problem is still pretty lame.
"Okay, hole, listen up..." If the mouse isn't affected by words simply
spoken aloud and not addressed specifically to it (>say "e"), it certainly
shouldn't be affected by words addressed to a specific other inanimate
object. So the mouse is in the hole - if Aunt Jemimah were holding the
mouse, would it respond to commands addressed to her?
-- Carl Muckenhoupt | Is it true that Kibo habitually autogreps all of Usenet baf@tiac.net | for his name? If so: Hi, Kibo. Like the sig?