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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: [Inform] Suppressing the [More] prompt
Message-ID: <GK04Dy.HKt@world.std.com>
Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2001 07:20:22 GMT
References: <GJy03H.Ktv@world.std.com> <Xns91228A809FBE1knight37m@209.155.56.100> <3BAA4C66.7E7B342D@hotmail.com> <9odii5$869$1@watserv3.uwaterloo.ca>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
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Xref: news.duke.edu rec.arts.int-fiction:92809

Joe Mason <jcmason@student.math.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
>Muffy St. Bernard <muffysbnospam@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>  My question is...is there any way to suppress the [More] prompt?  As
>>it is, the game will play until a full screen of text is written...then
>>it prompts [More] and waits for me to hit a key.  Ideally, I'd like it
>>just to busily play away until I turn my Autorun mode off.
>
>This is completely under the control of the interpreter.  Some might not even
>*ahve* a [More] prompt - they could rely completely on scrollbars, or be doing
>voice output, or just emitting the text to a chat room and letting the chat
>client deal with it (like Floyd).

They could... but 99% of the time they do have a [More] prompt.

I assume you're providing this long list to explain why this is
the "right" thing, but it's pretty obvious that you could have
a "hint to the interpreter to turn off paging" that would be
a no-op on the appropriate interpreters. Hints are not verboten
in general-purpose APIs; for example, OpenGL provides a number
of hinting functions which are optional.

Personally, I'm a bit peeved at the whole "let's print [More]
within the same space where the interpreted program prints, but
not make the text of '[More]' something under the control of the
interpreted program". Intermixing the output from these two programs
which neither can have any clue how the other one formats its text
is pretty risky. Not only would this be confusing in a game which,
say, prints a list of items in square brackets, but it really
peeved me when I was trying to write a lipogrammatic game way back
when (see also the faux mud transcript at the end of Fit for a Queen).

Note that Infocom could change the interpreter for games that
needed it, but we don't generally have that option.

SeanB
