Re: Inform Tutorials wanted!


3 Apr 1995 14:30:44 GMT

In article <GDR11.95Apr2103155@stint.cl.cam.ac.uk>,
Gareth Rees <gdr11@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>Daniel Kottmann <100600.136@CompuServe.COM> wrote:
>> Maybe somebody could write like a tutorial on the important
>> stuff. Like, outline the idea of what we want to code, e.g. a NPC
>> character, then think of how it should behave, and then turn the idea
>> bit for bit into code, explaining every step. That would help me(maybe
>> some other newbies as well) a great deal...
>
>You're really asking someone to teach you to program. The skills and
>techniques you'd use to turn your idea of how an NPC should behave into
>Inform code are the same skills and techniques you'd use to turn any
>idea of how a progam should behave into an algorithm. If you can write
>code in any programming language, you shouldn't have much difficulty
>writing Inform code.

That's true, provided the Inform novice in question knows exactly what
his NPC is supposed to do. In other words, if the question is "I have
designed my NPC:s, now tell me how to code them", then your answer is
appropriate. In that case, it's just a Simple Matter of Programming.

However, I think that in most cases the situation is not quite that
simple. When somebody asks about help coding an NPC, they often (not
always, of course) need as much advice about how to design an NPC -
i.e. the question is "How do I design and code an NPC?".

By "design", I don't mean just writing down how the NPC is to interact
with the player (on a high level, as seen from the user's
perspective), but how it should interact with the rest of the program
on a lower level.

Often, the poor programmer ends up in a vicious circle: since he's
unfamiliar with the language, he doesn't know what the NPC object is
supposed to do. SInce he doesn't know that, he can't find the correct
section in the reference manual.

In the TADS manual there is a rather good section about designing and
implementing NPC:s. This is a real tutorial, starting with very simple
NPC:s and moving on to more complex ones.

I must beg to disagree with Gareth and say that IMHO something like that
for Inform would be needed. Knowing how to program in, say, C, is *not*
enough when you're moving into an entirely new programming paradigm.

-----
Magnus Olsson - mol@df.lth.se, magnus_olsson@ivab.se, was: magnus@thep.lu.se
Currently working on (in his copious free time)
BAST - an interactive tale
of cats, magic, mad professors, Egyptian gods, and techno music.