Re: Limitations of Inform and TADS?


5 Nov 1995 14:54:03 -0500

In article <47ekib$e2o@life.ai.mit.edu>, David Baggett <dmb@ai.mit.edu> wrote:
>In article <DHHGDK.L0K@eskimo.com>, Fred Sloniker <lazuli@eskimo.com> wrote:
>>Everywhere I look today, I see video games loaded with six CDs of graphics
>>and sound that won't play properly on anything less than a 66 MHz 486 with
>>eight megs of memory, an SVGA card, and Windows.
>>[...]
>>This is to be expected from programs that want to push the limits of what
>>is possible with graphics and sound [...]
>>
>>You must remember, however, that we are talking about text adventures.
>
>The sentiment is that since these are "just text adventures", you should be
>able to run them on an obsolete machine. That I, the "mere text adventure
>author," should use low-level tools to write my games, even if it takes 10
>times as long as a result, so you'll be able to run them. That graphics
>and sound games "deserve" more resources, but all-text games don't.

I don't think that was Fred's point, but I'll let him respond on this
one...in the game industry in general, though, a lot of programmers are
getting sloppy. The original Doom will run (albeit slowly) on a low-end
386 - that's NEAT. (And Princess Maker 2 will run on a 286, which you'd
think would be a selling point, but these days...).

Surely you'd agree that it's possible to optimize TADS (even with the
stuff you've done) to make Legend run on a 286 - if you had an extra year
to spare. :)

<Much clipped about virtual adventure systems, etc.>
Fred continues:
>>Therefore, you want to do as much as you can to let everyone possible play
>>your game, because the audience is so small to begin with.
>
>Tell me: what do I gain by reaching a larger audience? I'm curious what
>you think the big payoff is for writing IF --- for any machine.

I'd say the legions of slathering female groupies. :)

>I write IF mainly for fun. It's an interesting thing to do. It's a
>creative outlet. It's a good way to get fiction writing experience. It
>can generate useful feedback. But only people who are really interested in
>IF as a medium provide such feedback. The tens of thousands (if that) who
>just download the games every once in a while to waste some time don't ever
>send *me* mail, at least.

Ahah! Here we see glimpses into Dave's "the artist is divorced from his
audience" mentality - aka "the audience doesn't really matter." While
it's true he gives a nod to "feedback" he clearly feels how the audience
reacts to his work is more or less meaningless...

Stop me if I'm wrong.

>And don't even get me started on the commercial potential of all-text IF.
>Dave Leary and I have explored this, and have determined that there
>basically isn't any.

More or less true. Trying Tim's idea might have been interesting...and
keep in mind that at their core, big popular multi-media (spit) titles
owe a lot to Infocom, et.al.

Fred continues, as the voice of reason:
>>(I wouldn't expect my old Commie 128, or a TRS-80, to load up
>>"Curses", but my Amiga happily multitasks it with my terminal program
>>and a few shell windows...) They simply don't need huge whopping
>>computer resources.

And Dave, completely missing the point, responds:
>I don't see why you feel that a TRS-80 is too old to be supported while an
>Amiga and 286 aren't.

Leaving aside the obvious comment that the TRS-80 predates the Amiga and
the 286 by a few years, the fact is that a text adventure - in ANY
incarnation - should not need to draw on as many CPU-intensive processes
as a real-time, graphics-intensive game of ANY sort. If it does,
something's amiss.

>Optimization is really not the issue. It's that all these systems run on
>emulated virtual machines, for the sake of portability. There are good
>virtual machine implementations of Scheme out there (Scheme48 & VSCM), and
>I'd be willing to bet that games written in languages built on top of them
>would be slower than Curses on your 286, if you could get either to run
>under crappy real mode DOS at all. So does that mean I shouldn't write
>text adventures in Scheme, since you can't run them on your 286?

Portability is an interesting issue, and probably your most valid point.
You're clearly bound by the limits of whatever language you're using to
write your games. If Scheme adventures won't work on a 286, well, yer
outta luck.

Fred continues:
>>However, as best I can interpret what you've just said, you're saying that
>>it's my own fault I can't play 'Legend' because I can't afford to buy a
>>'decent' PC.
>
>First of all, you can probably get a used 386 motherboard for about $25 at
>a flea market or hardware swap fest. Though I haven't checked mail order
>prices recently, I bet that by now a 486 motherboard would be less than
>what you paid for net access this year.

Ah, the attitude which makes the industry what it is today! Change "486"
to "Pentium" in the above paragraph, and Dave could work at Origin!

>Second, you choose to spend your money on certain things and not on others.
>Most IF "fans" who spend $10 on a pizza without a second thought won't
>spend the same to register UU1, Save Princeton, or two dozen other good
>shareware games. This is a choice, not a necessity.

I've recently come to conclude net access is a necessity. It's certainly
helping me look for a job, for instance. I think we're moving more and
more toward a society of two classes, the computer literate and everyone
else...but that's another thread.

>Should I *really* be overly concerned about supporting the fair-weather
>friends --- the ones who will play my stuff as long as it costs them
>nothing and doesn't require them to go to any trouble? Been there, done
>that. I wrote *Atari* software for 5 years.

What about the pure artistic satisfaction of your work? This doesn't
seem to fit with your stated reason for writing IF. See above.

>There's no reason that these kinds of discussions need to get personal.

Why not? S'more fun that way. ;)

>My
>opinion is just that... an opinion. But I will say this: I may draw the
>mandatory upgrade line much higher than you do, but you draw a line too.
>Is that unfair to TRS-80 users? Is it arrogant, since you are in the
>privileged class --- those who have mid 80's personal computers instead of
>late 70's era ones?

Ah, answering a question with a question. "I'm rubber, you're glue" type
o' argument. Been there, done that...

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.

>I think drawing the line so far down the obsolescence hierarchy is not good
>for IF, and it certainly makes my life much harder. Maybe it wouldn't take
>two years to write a game like Curses or Legend if we could use
>higher-abstraction languages instead of C derivatives.

Maybe. D'ya think Neb might have finished UU3 if he'd had a higher-level
language?

The big drag on my games was always story/plot issues rather than coding
issues. Once I knew where I was going, I could bang out stuff pretty
fast. And by God, that's how it should be - if the focus in IF is where
it should be.

-----
Dave Leary
(Nope, my views don't represent UMAB...good thing, huh?)

"I've been of thousand devils caught,
And thrust into that horrid place,
Where reign dismay, despair, disgrace." -- George Crabbe