Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
Tags

Can you explain how to use articles properly?

A topic by Garry Francis created Oct 10, 2019 Views: 118 Replies: 8
Viewing posts 1 to 5
Submitted

I know from an early question in the Adventuron CaveJam that an object should generally provide an article (a, an, some, the) in the object description. Adventuron cleverly identifies the indefinite articles and replaces them with the definite article (the) in some responses. If you don't provide suitable articles, you can get some strange responses.

I'm wondering what articles are understood, what do you do when no article is appropriate, what do you do about proper nouns, does Adventuron distinguish between singular (a, an) and plural (some) objects and can you define your own articles if you have one that Adventuron doesn't understand (such as "lots of" in "lots of loot").

The doco says, "If you don’t know what an article is, or which one to use, ask a teacher or a trusted grown up." So I asked a trusted grown up and he said, "Adventuron? Get a life dude!" (Maybe he wasn't so trusted.)

Submitted

Also, is it necessary to provide an article for scenery, as it can never be taken or dropped?

Submitted

Here's another one. I have a couple of these. How do I define something like a bottle of water, when I want bottle to be the noun?

Host
bottle : object "a bottle of water";

In vocabulary section:

:noun { aliases = [bottle, water]}
Submitted

And clarification of articles?

Host

Articles cannot be manually defined at the moment (I think) but I may be wrong (away from computer). The "lots of" will simply be ignored by the parser as they are not in the dictionary.

E.g. 

Get lots of honey

Would be parsed as

Verb = get

Noun = honey

When it comes to printing it would print, 

"You get lots of honey" rather than "you get the honey". But you can override the get message on the object itself. Via get_message = ""

Submitted

get_message? Really? Where'd that come from? I guess that's like examine_message. Are there any others, like (say) drop_message? Are these more efficient than verbose match statements? I imagine that they are.

I've answered the first part of my own question. I just made an intentional mistake in an object definition so that I could get an error and a tooltip with suggestions. Ignoring all the experimental ones, there's all sorts of interesting goodies in there, including those mentioned above, definite_article and indefinite_article. What are on_examine and traits? These look interesting.

Host (1 edit)

Anything discovered in such a way is not guaranteed to work in future versions of adventuron. There are a lot of hidden goodies in Adventuron, but some of them are rotten (not implemented).

I think definite article and indefinite article are not yet wired up. Examine message, get message, drop message, and traits I believe are working. But traits leads you down a rabbit hole where you'll fine insufficient functions to use them powerfully. I hide things to prototype with and discover what's missing.

Submitted

Understood.