Summertime Frolicking

One of my favorite things about frolicking is how quickly I get sick of it and want to return to my projects.  That said, August is lousy with birthdays among my friends and family (of course, I mean that in the quantitative, Catcher in the Rye sense and not the qualitative one), and I've still got some pool parties, a "pedal tavern," and possibly a trip to the Renaissance Faire in my future.

Still, I can't wait to submerge myself in something Hugo again.  Earlier this week, I made some progress in my most recent problem; I had noticed how horribly broken the baby-naming code was in my silly, nonsensical game, "Baby Uncle New Year," and I wanted to fix it up.

I was hoping my new code would be general enough that I could easily throw it into Roodylib for everybody to use, but it ended up being too specifically purposed.  When I get back to coding, writing that general purpose system will probably be my next task.

Ideally, I'd like it to do these things:

1.  If the game is being played on an interpreter that supports Hugo's timing system (and accessibility mode is not turned on), it would throw up a floating window like in my game "The Halloween Horror" and use my "fake prompt" code to capture the input and writing it straight to an array.
2. If the game is being played on a glk interpreter or has accessibility mode turned on, it has a prompt in the main window.  Actual Hugo prompts are tricky because unless the text is within quotation marks, Hugo can only keep track of one unrecognized word.  I'll have to find a tactful way to instruct the player accordingly.
3. Both of these will result in a, "'<blah>'? Is that correct?" response so the player can double-check how it was received.  Even with whatever nudging I give, the main window Hugo prompts have a fair possibility of being wrong, like if the player used any of the "removal" words ("a", "an", "the", "some", "of") that Hugo automatically drops from input lines.
4. Include an option to write all unrecognized words to the game dictionary and apply them to an object.

At least one game in progress by another person uses my "fake prompt" code so I figure this system could be useful to others as well.  Besides this, I need to reacquaint myself with my Hugo "to do" list and see if there's anything else I'd like to add before the next Roodylib release.  I also have some real world research I want to do on one of my game ideas.

Here's to ending 2016 with a little more Hugo in the world!