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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: [Inform] Suppressing the [More] prompt
Message-ID: <GK3LML.Ctt@world.std.com>
Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2001 04:25:32 GMT
References: <9ojg3d$16g$1@ddawson.ddawson>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
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Xref: news.duke.edu rec.arts.int-fiction:92857

Daniel Dawson <ddawson@altavista.net> wrote:
>Anyway, that would work. I guess what I was saying was that in text-only
>environments, '[More]' is about the only way to do it.

I was not saying there was anything wrong with games
printing "[More]"; my post implied (supposedly) that
*if* the interpreter is going to put a "[more]"-like
prompt in the same area that the interpreted program
prints its text, then the text of that prompt should
be under the control of the interpreted program, not
the interpreter; i.e., since the text of my original
post also included a discussion for a scenario where
I considered it appropriate to have an API call that
would "hint" the game's desired behavior for another
"[more]"-scenario (suppressing it entirely), I admit
that I added my cantankerous commentary on this part
of the "[more]" equation based on the belief that it
would be appropriate to use exactly the same sort of
interpreter-hint tech to determine the "[more]" text
while also realizing that it's not likely anything's
going to change for existing systems anyway; that is
to say, I was just venting--Infocom was free to make
changes to the interpreter for specific games (which
I assume was the case for Borderzone), while today's
authors use the system (which one could argue wasn't
engineered to solve *every* problem every imaginable
game might encounter) without having that freedom to
change it--or to put it yet another way, it in truth
ruins a game I was working on to have "[more]" print
on the screen, but it would not ruin it if I was the
one who picked the text for that prompt; and I think
there are sound ways to engineer the systems so that
the prompt's text could be chosen by the game author.

SeanB
