[MUD-Dev] Text Parsing

[Kylotan]

Ross Nicoll wrote:
> On Tue, 1 Jun 1999, Kylotan wrote:
>
> > This is even more notable when you consider that these games
> > used to run on 64k machines (of which 16k was video memory on my
> > particular model).
> I've worked on text games in the Infocom format, and the parser is
hardly
> simple. About 280k of Inform code is used, just for the basic
> parser, although this means that game files tend to be around 100-200k
> these days. The games that ran in 64k were relatively cut down, from
what
> I've heard...

Sure, but they were still a lot more functional than most Diku variants,
from my own experiences. I remember that The Hobbit (by Melbourne House, I
think) copes admirably with adverbs, prepositions and so on. This ran in
64k with some basic graphics code also competing for space. It did have
fewer verbs/commands than most muds, which may be an important factor. And
I understand that some of that code might have been calls to firmware
routines, etc. But it's still very small, relatively.

> > So surely, there is some -simple- parser model that is
> > not going to take much coding time, memory or resources, and yet would
> > improve many muds significantly?
> Wouldn't take much memory, but coding time would be very, very long
> compared to a simple parser, and it would have a much higher CPU usage
too
> (although that may not make so much of a difference).

Well, I would have thought that something that used to execute within half
a second on a Z80 CPU would not be a problem, performance-wise. But then,
if I fully understood what was going on here, I wouldn't need to be asking
:)  I expect, however, that the code in modern interactive-fiction engines
such as Inform or Tads has a lot more code than is needed for a parser of
the complexity I am talking about.

Kylotan.



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