A suggestion about plural and singular with parties

[Failedassassin]

I don't know if anyone but me has noticed this, but it sort of annoys me when NPCs refer to me as one lone adventurer rather than a party of adventurers. It's not that big of a deal, and I'm sure it might make the game easier to write, but in your newest game, Jeff, you might want to think about remembering that. I don't know, am I just being a grammar nazi? What do you think?

[Ephesos]

As someone who used to bother making this distinction in their Blades of Avernum scenarios, it's a pain. Take every single node you've written that refers to the party, multiply by two. Yes, it's all simple enough, but it builds up into a nuisance very very quickly.

[Student of Trinity]

Can't you just make a macro? Heck, you could do it with Typinator or something similar; you could also easily write it into your editor.

 

I mean, if you're Jeff, writing the game as your business, and writing the editor for your own use. I don't doubt that it's a huge pain in BoA.

[nikki.]

Originally Posted By: Failedassassin

I don't know if anyone but me has noticed this, but it sort of annoys me when NPCs refer to me as one lone adventurer rather than a party of adventurers.

Maybe all NPCs are like the expedition leaders in that Monty Python sketch about the expedition to Mt. Kilimanjaro?

(For both of you you haven't seen the sketch, here it is, you philistines:

)

[Ephesos]

SoT: Unless there's a real pattern to it, it would probably be more of a pain than it would be helpful. And in BoA, it's just flat-out not worth it.

 

And that is truly an excellent sketch. I am quite happy to say I had seen it before.

[Student of Trinity]

But there is a fairly short list of English words that change with number. Especially if you avoid using 'thee', 'thou', and 'y'all'. You could create the macros for each one, and then just search-and-replace-all your game text to turn normal words into party-number-sensitive macros.

[Niemand]

Quote:

You could create the macros for each one, and then just search-and-replace-all your game text to turn normal words into party-number-sensitive macros.

I assume you mean in the case where you were building the game engine, so that you would teach the engine to choose the correct replacement for the macro at runtime? It sounds to me like that could work reasonably well. However, as Eph describes, it gets a lot more painful if you try to handle things as a designer with BoA, since the problem isn't so much the changing words themselves needing to be altered as that you need to create entire additional text strings within talk node, or entire additional talk nodes, to contain them, and then add logic to appropriately switch which text strings or talk nodes are used.

[Lord Safey]

I have seen it done in the Escape velocity series where they would use the name you gave them as well as your designated gender.

[Dintiradan]

It's what Niemand and Ephesos said -- AvernumScript itself doesn't have macros, and its string handling functions are very limited. One could potentially write a program that reads in a dialogue script and spits out a modified one with the correct pluralization, but there are a bunch of problems with this approach:

 

• The macro program wouldn't know when to pluralize. You might have a NPC who refers to the adventurer(s) as (an) idiot(s). If you make your program smart enough to do that, you'll run into problems when the Big Bad is referred to as a bunch of idiots. I suppose the original dialogue script could have something like [an idiot|bunch of idiots] in the string.
• The macro program effectively produces a build artifact, something that doesn't fit in the Blades paradigm, where no compilation is needed. Developers would have to run the macro program every time they update the original dialogue script.
• Finally, AvernumScript has a bunch of hardwired limits built in. You can only have 6 strings per dialogue state (effectively less if the state has a special action), and each string has a maximum length of 254 (pretty sure it's 254, not 255). Also, if I recall correctly, each dialogue script is limited to 200 states. In the worse case scenario, using the macro program would limit you to 100 states each with three strings (or less).

 

I don't see this as a big enough issue for JV to change his scripting language over. Just be thankful the games are in English, so we can use the wonderful word 'you'. Spectacular pronoun -- gender and count doesn't matter, and it's the same as a subject or object.

[Student of Trinity]

Yes, I had in mind the Escape Velocity feature that lets you easily make gender-sensitive dialogs.

 

But I suppose you could just make two versions of a BoA scenario, one for singletons, one for parties. It would be a bit of a pain for a long scenario, of course; but you could make it a bit easier by writing a first version with something like 'XXXdo' for every 'do' that might change to 'does' with a singleton, and so on for all the other words or phrases that might need changing. Then just search-and-replace with a text editor for 'XXX' to skip through automatically to every item that needs changing. That's probably not too much more work than the minimum necessary, anyway. So if it's ever worth doing in any game, I guess it could be worth doing that way in BoA.

[Dintiradan]

Okay, but then you're forking your final product, which is inherently evil ;-). This doubles your post-release bug fixes, as well as your testing paths (of course, no one could possibly test all paths, but still). It also doesn't scale well: if you had to fork for some different reason (say, gender of the party leader), you now have four scenarios you have to maintain.

 

Sorry if I'm not displaying a "can do" attitude. If there ever was a scenario where party count was very important, your approach above would work. In general, though, I still think it's more trouble than it's worth. (un)Luckily, most BoA players have tried their hands at designing at some point, so they understand how difficult it is.

 

(Of course, the above only refers to BoA. JV isn't going to produce another Blades, so he's free to make future scripting languages more complicated so they can handle stuff like this. I wouldn't hold my breath, though.)

[Student of Trinity]

Well, three prongs to the fork, since plural doesn't distinguish gender. And since the only difference between the final versions is a few dialog entries, it seems unlikely they would actually have different bugs.

 

If you were really worried about this, you could maintain one master version in which every 'they' that might potentially need to be a 'she' or a 'he' is written 'theyXX73', and so on. Fix all your bugs or whatever in that version — it's final, after all, except for some funny dialog lines. Then just run a couple of 'replace all' steps to do the final forking.

 

Sure, it's a minor pain, but my impression was that BoA was all about suffering pain to make something the way you want it. If you want dialog that fits the party, it doesn't have to cost too much pain.