creating a text adventure, but with what programming language?

[Karlos]

True BASIC has the absolute best string handling of any language ever.

I would rank Perl and PHP as far above any BASIC dialect in terms of string processing capability

[ChaosLord]

I would rank Perl and PHP as far above any BASIC dialect in terms of string processing capability

But then you would be wrong.

[Karlos]

But then you would be wrong.

:roflmao:

Sure. BASIC is better at string manipulation than Perl/PHP.

Thanks, that made my day!

[nicholas]

How about PureBasic?

The full version is free for Amigas.

http://www.purebasic.com/

[runequester]

No fighting guys

[Karlos]

No fighting guys

I'm not advocating the writing of text adventure games in languages like Perl (though I am sure it has been done), but the point has to be made that manipulation of text was one of the main motivations of Perl in the first place. It may be old and it may be a beast but every language has it's milieu and chewing on textual data is Perl's.

[EDanaII]

But let's not forget that manipulation of strings is only one small aspect of a text adventure. Modeling and interacting with the environment is the major aspect of any adventure game.


@ yakumo9275

Actually, Inform7 is out. I've been playing with it a little bit. It's an interesting approach for an (effectively) dead art form.

[Holmes]

Lisp !!!!!

[ChaosLord]

@Karlos
Ok go ahead.  Show me in Perl how to extract a 3 characters string from another string starting at the 5th character and then insert that extracted string into another string starting at the 20th character.

[Karlos]

@Karlos
Ok go ahead.  Show me in Perl how to extract a 3 characters string from another string starting at the 5th character and then insert that extracted string into another string starting at the 20th character.

Well, I'm more of a C/C++ guy but I am at least aware that the substr() function in Perl can also be an lvalue, which allows all kinds of useful manipulation of the type you are asking for:

http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/substr.html

And that's not even using regular expressions, for which I'm sure the next PCRE expert will produce some 8 character expression to do your task.

But of course, nobody would be using absolute string positions, right? Terribly bad form if you want to support minor things like alternative character sets and foreign languages.

[Franko]

Way back around 82 when I got my very first VIC 20 the only game I had for it in the first couple of weeks was a plain text adventure called Mission Impossible on a cartridge the store threw in for free...

I always remember switching it on and me and the brother in law sitting there with hugely disappointed faces and asking each other "is this it..."

Boy were we wrong... within an hour we were both arguing should we go east, should we go west, open that door, no don't open that one...

Suffice to say from that moment on we were hooked...

Hopefully, when you've completed your game you'll release it for all us old adventurers to enjoy, best of luck...

(Strange... just writing this post I can still conjure up the images in my mind of all the locations described in that game...

[ErrethAkbe]

write it in inform6 and then use any infocom interpreter on the amiga... that would be pretty traidtional, you can do pics + music but I dont know the formats...

This is the best suggestion so far.  It's a proper programming environment that is designed specifically for the task, has compilers for lots of systems and the resulting code is 100% portable to other platforms.  You could run the resulting adventure as easily on an iPhone as on an Amiga or even a TRS-80.

If you're unfamiliar, it's an evolved version of the same language that games like Zork, Enchanter and Starcross were written in.  There is still an active community of people who write adventures in "Z Code" so getting support would be easy.

If this approach interests you, start searching with "Z-machine" and "Inform" as search terms.

Hope this helps!

[Franko]

Lisp !!!!!

No... I althwayss tsalkss like thissss... :lol:

[Nameless]

Like others have mentioned, I'd recommend either Tads or Inform over coding from scratch.

I also like Alan --
http://www.welcome.to/alan-if

The Amiga version is rather out of date, however. If interested, I think the source code is available for Alan v. 3, so it may be an interesting option to port it to  3.1, 4, AROS, MorphOS, etc.

I did a bit of coding in Alan years ago, and although it's a little underpowered compared to Inform, it's a fun language.

I also wrote several text adventures using TACL and Visionary for the Amiga ages ago, and although they are pretty easy to use, they aren't up to par with modern day IF languages.

[runequester]

I appreciate all the suggestions guys
 
I am keen on using something that can later be used to develop other applications or games too, rather than a tool that purely does text adventure, as I want this to be a starting point.
 
But its a brave new world out there, and I'll have to get my feet wet anyways

[nicholas]

I appreciate all the suggestions guys
 
I am keen on using something that can later be used to develop other applications or games too, rather than a tool that purely does text adventure, as I want this to be a starting point.
 
But its a brave new world out there, and I'll have to get my feet wet anyways

My Amiga resolution is to master 68k assembly, perhaps you could code your game in assembly and we could help each other with the learning process?