What are you playing now?

[gumby]

I think I'll go back to KQ2. Could anyone tell me what the text parser name is for that red thing outside grandma's house?

Are referring to the red flag on the mailbox?

[Datadog]

It's mostly smoke & mirrors though. Characters will talk about your decisions from way back all the time but it doesn't actually influence the course of the game that much.

Yeah, I'm starting to gather that it's a lot like "Mass Effect". Same plotline no matter what, but with interchangeable characters based on who lives. I'm guessing there's a lot of extra scenes, though. After finishing the game, I browsed through the WD wiki and found several sequences I'd missed.

I'm also impressed with how well this was written in accordance with the source material. I know Telltale pretty much nails the writing styles every time, but "The Walking Dead" gave them an excuse to flex their writing muscles. There isn't a single one-dimensional character, and they believably develop based on your actions. I can't even find the seams in their dialogue - it all flows naturally. Like Andrea mentioned, this is an adventure game where you really don't need the puzzles to keep you thinking.

Also - Dave Fennoy! I knew I heard that voice somewhere. Had to look it up after I was done. Lee Everett is voiced by the Shopkeeper from King's Quest VI. Too cool.

[BBP]

I think I'll go back to KQ2. Could anyone tell me what the text parser name is for that red thing outside grandma's house?

Are referring to the red flag on the mailbox?

Is it MAILBOX? I think I typed OPEN MAIL BOX and LOOK IN MAIL BOX and it didn't work.

[Collector]

One word, "mailbox".

[Tawmis]

See, in this case, I can see why "Point & Click Interface" (that we saw like from KQ5 forward) could be preferred, especially to non Native speaking/type English folks in the world. I remember when they first changed to the point & click, I actually wrote Sierra a furious email. (I was young then, and very self centered, and never even considered the idea that these games were being played outside the US) - but I truly learned how to type as quickly as I do, thanks to Sierra games.

But as I have gotten older (much, much, much older! ), I realize how the point & click could be far more widely beneficial.

[Collector]

That is my only complaint with the parser. I detest the "guess the word I am thinking of now" game with the developer. Don't forget that even though English has become the modern day Latin, there are regional differences in what things are called, too, wardrobe vs chiffarobe, elevator vs lift, TV vs telly, ad vs advert, etc. It is pretty irritating to keep having the the default unknown input message thrown back at you, no matter how clever that message is. Even a native speaker cannot fully anticipate a lazy programmer or a non-robust parser. This is one thing that Sierra fell short on compared to other developers. They were jealous of Infocom's parser.

By the time you get to late SCI0 games you at least could right click on an object to "look" at that object, even without knowing what the developer decided to call it. This "right click=look" was a great addition that Gumby made to the SCI Studio/Companion template game.

[Tawmis]

That is my only complaint with the parser. I detest the "guess the word I am thinking of now" game with the developer. Don't forget that even though English has become the modern day Latin, there are regional differences in what things are called, too, wardrobe vs chiffarobe, elevator vs lift, TV vs telly, ad vs advert, etc. It is pretty irritating to keep having the the default unknown input message thrown back at you, no matter how clever that message is. Even a native speaker cannot fully anticipate a lazy programmer or a non-robust parser. This is one thing that Sierra fell short on compared to other developers. They were jealous of Infocom's parser.

By the time you get to late SCI0 games you at least could right click on an object to "look" at that object, even without knowing what the developer decided to call it. This "right click=look" was a great addition that Gumby made to the SCI Studio/Companion template game.

Ah, you mean Locker Gnome?

The narrator of Locker Gnome is stunningly sexy sounding...

But back to Sierra and their parser... was it really lazy programming or was it a limit on the parser?

[Tawmis]

But back to Sierra and their parser... was it really lazy programming or was it a limit on the parser?

You know if it was lazy programming - a shame these games aren't freeware... Because we could use the AGI/SCI Editors to go in there - and add some additional options (like "Open Mail Box" rather than it just being "Open Mailbox") and make those versions available...

[Collector]

But back to Sierra and their parser... was it really lazy programming or was it a limit on the parser?

A lot of the times it falls on the programmer. By lazy I mean that not enough effort was put into building and using a full vocabulary. You can add more words to the VOCAB resource. The more words added will allow the parser to recognize more. You also need to use each synonym in the code. In other words when using an "if Said" statement you need to add all possible variations of a given word. It might not have been a bad idea for a developer to have had a thesaurus at hand when developing a game.

You brought up LockerGnome Redux. This is a good example. The original was written by Brain Provinciano to showcase SCI Studio on the old TechTV show, "Call for Help" when Chris Pirillo (the LockerGnome) was the host. The vocabulary was limited with no right click functionality. These were both things that Gumby added.

[BBP]

Thanks guys! In Dutch (German too) you just string words together when they describe a single object (like chicken soup), and I know English doesn't do that, so placing spaces is a bit troublesome for me.
The Sierra text parsers can be frustrating: the only one that's really thinking with you is in LSL1. But when I looked at words.tok of KQ3 and found how relatively forgiving it could be, there's no lazy programming in that case... it's just... I think and use different words than a native speaker when I speak English, and you can't really replicate that even if you have a lot of American people beta-test it.

This morning I fired up Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened again, with better lighting and to see if it got my father seasick (he had trouble with the ol' brick maze screensaver Windows used to have). It took him much longer: I even got sick after a few minutes of showing my father around, he managed to run around for fifteen minutes until he'd had it.

I'm all for a Stop Useless 3D In Video Games movement.

And, now that I've uninstalled it, it's still gving me headaches. Apparently it installed an outdated driver and when I fire up the laptop, it says it deactivated an outdated driver that's no longer compatible.

[DeadPoolX]

I remember when they first changed to the point & click, I actually wrote Sierra a furious email. (I was young then, and very self centered, and never even considered the idea that these games were being played outside the US) - but I truly learned how to type as quickly as I do, thanks to Sierra games.

If it makes you feel any better, when I was a kid, I thought classes on "western civilization" meant the western expansion of the US. It wasn't until I was in junior high that I realized they meant western nations as a whole.

Actually, in high school, during World History, I distinctly recall a classmate of mine arguing with the teacher about the distinction between England, Great Britain and the United Kingdom. My classmate kept saying they were the same thing, but my teacher correctly pointed out that she was wrong.

Come to think of it... I remember another classmate, in that same class, who openly asked: "Is World War 1 the one with the Nazis?"

Hard to believe that was supposed to an honors class.

That is my only complaint with the parser. I detest the "guess the word I am thinking of now" game with the developer.

Don't forget that even though English has become the modern day Latin, there are regional differences in what things are called, too, wardrobe vs chiffarobe, elevator vs lift, TV vs telly, ad vs advert, etc.

Alterations in spelling as well. Check vs cheque, for instance.

It goes beyond the differences between AE, AuE, BE and CE.

Different words can mean the same thing in various areas of the same country; sometimes even the same state or province!

[Tawmis]

But back to Sierra and their parser... was it really lazy programming or was it a limit on the parser?

A lot of the times it falls on the programmer. By lazy I mean that not enough effort was put into building and using a full vocabulary. You can add more words to the VOCAB resource. The more words added will allow the parser to recognize more. You also need to use each synonym in the code. In other words when using an "if Said" statement you need to add all possible variations of a given word. It might not have been a bad idea for a developer to have had a thesaurus at hand when developing a game.

Yeah, that's why I was asking... I have looked at the VOCAB resource, and done plenty "if then" type statements... The reason I asked, is because when I made one of my first "text adventure" games Final Soul (not my first "text game" however), it was actually a limit of the compiler. It literally ran out of memory when trying to compile the code; so I had to go back and make a lot of adjustments and short cuts. (As a result, it suffers the same fate as LSL2, ironically - there's a part near the end, where you have to go up into the attic of the house, and if you don't phrase it perfect - the game doesn't understand. (Maybe that's why I love LSL2 so much, I feel that pain...)

[gumby]

But back to Sierra and their parser... was it really lazy programming or was it a limit on the parser?

My take is that they weren't lazy, just that the text-input was understated. The parser is fully capable of handling quite complex inputs (here are some really complex ones that I was able to get it to recognize: Said() Strings - Comprehensive Examples). One of my favorites is "quickly play short game of checkers again".

As Collector pointed out, mainly it is just an issue of too sparse a vocabulary. Almost all games could be instantly improved with some well-chosen synonyms. This is actually something that we can do today without having to recompile the scripts. For SCI games, just open the game with Studio or Companion & start adding synonyms for existing words into the VOCAB.000 resource. It's limiting; you can't add if/then logic (this would be embedded in the scripts & we can't directly reverse-engineer them). But it's an easy thing to do, no programming experience required. EDIT: I just added the synonym 'peek' for 'look' in SQ3. Fired up the game and now I can 'peek' around all I want .

I think that playtesting is really the only way to ensure that you haven't missed any obvious inputs. I had a lot of help with testing both Locker Gnome Redux and 120 Degrees Below Zero and there were plenty of inputs that I completely overlooked. I think my number of acceptable parser inputs doubled in both for both games after testing was completed; something that if you asked me before testing began I would have never believed.

[BBP]

Finished KQ2. The hardest part was getting on and off the ferry, word-guessing wise.
6 down, only KQ1 to go!

[Tawmis]

Finished KQ2. The hardest part was getting on and off the ferry, word-guessing wise.
6 down, only KQ1 to go!

Did you do KQ in a backwards order?