Are there any AGS games out there that use text parsing like the old Sierra AGI and SCIO games?
It would be nice if there was a built in way to automaticly do the various interactions by typing them in.
example:
if the player types "Look at cup" the game will run the LOOK interaction for the item "cup".
if the player types "Talk to Roger" the game will run the TALK interaction for the character "Roger".
if the player types "Use cup on Roger" then the game will run the "use inventory item" on Roger with the condition that the active item is the cup.
Maybe include an option to set a text parser equivalant word for each interaction?
Then players could possibly make text adventures like "Collosal Caves", but with the added bonus of graphics.
Well...it would probably be possible to make a script in the editor that checks the parser and picks out verbs and nouns and performs simple actions.
Maybe if somone did that tey could make an AGS template so others could do the same more easily...
Rode Quest 1 used a text parser. I think that it caused shawn a lot of grief, and heaps of people got stuck at a few certain points due to the parser. Get it at www.rodekill.com
But parsers can be cool.
Actually, automatically matching cursor modes and then the names of objects and hotspots in the room sounds like quite a cool idea, I'll add it to my list.
And until it makes it out of the list and into the engine, you can make do quite effectively with RunHotspotInteraction and such.
Let's put it this way, Rode Quest was supposed to be one of those "quickie, make it in a week" games, and then it ended up taking like a month to finish.
Now, two things to point out here:
1 - I am not a brilliant scripter by any means
2 - That was a long time ago, and I don't know what changes have been made to the parser system since then
There's just so much you have to think about when doing it, that it becomes a big mess really fast. Didn't help much that I was learning it as I went, like usual. :-\
That new system sounds interesting though. I haven't given up hope on the parser. I think there's still room for it in some capacity. I have big plans. Oh yes. Muhahahaha...
Well, i've been making a template and am currently writing sufficient readme instructions to get the user up and running. I also wrote a simple introductory tutorial to text parsing, cant remember the link but look around in the technical.... or possibly general? :P