tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-244261653878319863.post56700839309257574..comments2020-01-31T06:43:10.734-06:00Comments on Not Dead Hugo: roody labsRoodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735423363908850213noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-244261653878319863.post-30726879781581632582016-12-15T20:19:19.042-06:002016-12-15T20:19:19.042-06:00Yes, string support could be improve but I also im...Yes, string support could be improve but I also imagine you aren't yet familiar with what's there, and there already is the ability to accept and process keypresses.<br /><br />Also, as far as an IDE goes, some of the features you've wished for over a joltcountry.com already exist in any decent text editor with "send output to window" support. Most will let you doubleclick on line errors and go to the relevant spot in the code without any tweaking.<br /><br />Anyhow, it has been interesting to follow your progress as you look into these systems. Occasionally, you complain about their limitations. What I've found is that remarkable things can still be accomplished if you're clever enough. Andrew Plotkin's game, Hunter, In Darkness, has a 32K room maze with only a 16 bit VM. Great creativity comes out of working against limits. If you're unable to coax the system to do what you want, there's a reasonable chance you just don't know your tools well enough.Roodyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09735423363908850213noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-244261653878319863.post-80184254462967536912016-12-15T19:28:17.485-06:002016-12-15T19:28:17.485-06:00No, I'm not going to give up on TADS anytime s...No, I'm not going to give up on TADS anytime soon but from what I've seen I suspect Hugo has just as much capacity to do (almost) anything TADS can. (I qualified it; there might be some useful features TADS offers that Hugo doesn't.) But I think everyone who does programming should try something new every so often in order to get out of their comfort zone. It's the reason I wrote Tripkey and Teleport_Test in the first place. The latter was a proof of concept to show you could implement something Jonsey thought was impossible; a teleporter that could be designed to dynamically go to any room, and the former was to implement a portable teleporter. <br /><br />Getting out of the regular and into new things can give real benefits. I taught myself PHP from scratch over a few months and got pretty good at it.<br /><br />But I really think Hugo provides maybe 95% of what someone would want in an IF authoring system; about the only missing things are better string support, actual timer interrupts, and delimiterless input, the ability to accept and process keypresses without an enter key being pressed.<br /><br />Now, the really big thing TADS provides is an IDE. If I get mad enough at TADS that I throw my hands up in disgust, it wouldn't be too hard to modify the IDE to support .HUG, .G and .H files, instead of .T files, include either the standard library or Roodylib, and call the Hugo compiler, perhaps even including the "click on error message" window that goes to the source code line in error. Then that would really take out a big incentive to use TADS. Their IDE is a big selling feature of the system.Paul Robinsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08691621235704322096noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-244261653878319863.post-84639979269008929342016-12-12T15:58:27.933-06:002016-12-12T15:58:27.933-06:00Hello, Paul! As far as your suggestions go, yes, ...Hello, Paul! As far as your suggestions go, yes, instructions for raising default limit values is already one of the first things mentioned in the Roodylib documentation. I also personally recommend new Hugo users start off with Roodylib as I've made efforts to make the initial game shell cleaner and more organized so non-programmers get less discouraged (beyond all of the stuff that is fixed or improved "behind the curtain").<br /><br />I still think you shouldn't give up on TADS, though! You can do it!Roodyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09735423363908850213noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-244261653878319863.post-29145748332932914832016-12-12T15:36:13.222-06:002016-12-12T15:36:13.222-06:00Roody, if you're in effect rebuilding the syst...Roody, if you're in effect rebuilding the system to make it easier to use and that requires increasing a default value in order to compensate for it, then it's probably worth doing so and explaining this in the README file or the documentation for Roodylib. Let's be honest, I doubt seriously someone is going to use Roodylib on trying Hugo initially or on writing a game in Hugo until after they've had some experience with the system as initially set up and would only start using yours having had some experience with Hugo and discovering what you've done improves what was in the original distribution. Thus someone is using yours to enhance the system and as such, with an enhancement you may have to make changes. But simply enough if you push things far enough you may have to bite the bullet and admit you can't do everything in 350 routines, not counting the fact the programmer doing a game may have their own routines to include. <br /><br />If anything, I think the problem, which I've given some implication on my comments on Jolt Country, is that Hugo is a 16-bit environment in a world that has gone beyond even 32 bit applications into 64-bit and the underlying system has not kept up with what is available now in terms of resources and capability. When the system first came out, probably for Win 3.1, a machine might have 4 meg of memory and the limits it had were reasonable. My current machine has 8 GB of memory on Windows 8.1 64 bit, and some of the restrictions set then were valid but today the resources are much greater and some of them might be much too small for what we can do now.Paul Robinsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08691621235704322096noreply@blogger.com