Innovative Inventories

[Alun]

I'm big on quoting from games, apparently, but ALun_Clewe seems to be describing something similar to Lure of the Temptress, where you could TELL people to go someplace, do such-and-such action on such-and-such object, and etc. Whatever you SAW, whatever place you WERE IN, whatever you even SAW THROUGH A WINDOW, you could use in your commands.

I'm not familiar with Lure of the Temptress--what kind of game is it?

I know that allowing the player to ask characters about and otherwise refer to objects that aren't present is extremely common in text adventures, but AFAIK it hasn't been implemented in any pure point-and-click graphic adventures, though I freely admit that my familiarity with the genre is far less than complete and it's entirely possible it has been done in some adventure I'm unaware of.  How was it implemented in Lure of the Temptress?  The way you describe it sounds like it involved typed commands (in which case, no big deal; as I said, that's old hat in text adventures); is this the case, or was it implemented purely by point and click?  And if the latter, how?

[Babar]

Lure of the Temptress was one of the early Point and click games by Revolution Software. I think you can now get it free at their website (I am not sure what the address is, you could probably get it from google). It used a rather uncommon GUI (as far as my experience with Adventure games goes). The interactions generally depended on the objects they were used on (ie. "Drink" came up for bottle and "read" for note). as redruM said, whenever you looked at an object or passed through a room, it was stored in your GUI, and you could interact with other characters and ask them to "GO to Room-X", "Get Object-Y" or "Talk with Person-Z"

[Radiant]

Actually the whole concept of ordering people around can lead to many interesting puzzles. This has been extensively used in some old Infocom games, but not (to my knowledge) in any P&C games.
E.g. you can "squirrel, eat nut" to order it around. Of course not everybody does exactly what you tell them to. "warrior, give me the sword" simply means he'll tell you 'no'.

I'm somewhat at a loss as to how to implement this point-n-click-wise, though.

[TerranRich]

WEll, in Space Quest V, in addition to the Talk icon, there was an Order icon, which was just the Talk balloon with an exclamation mark inside. You could do this, then a prompt would come up and you could type in your order. I believe that a combination of text input and point-and-click would make the best interface.

[Goldmund]

And in "Dr Who in the mines of terror" you had a programmable cat, which led to great puzzles.
You threw around markers for it to use, and programmed commands like:
Go to marker 1
Pick up object
Go to marker 2
Use object

Which also reminds me of the body computer in two B.A.T. episodes (also point and clicks). It had it's own scripting language, and it was a lot of fun programming it, so that for example when you talked to an alien, a translator would start, or when in danger, your blood pressure would go up. Ah, French games! How I love you.

[GarageGothic]

You can find Lure of the Temptress, legally and for free, at http://revolution.co.uk/_display.php?id=10