Re: OLYMPIA: New command ideas

From: desj@ccr-p.ida.org (David desJardins)

Date: Fri, 08 Jul 1994 03:13:12 +0000

John Morrow <morrow@gandalf.rutgers.edu> writes:
>	IF unit a1a
>	  MOVE east
>	MOVE west

I know this is just an example, but it seems a very strange one.  Why
would you want to MOVE EAST and then immediately MOVE WEST?  This
certainly illustrates why you need a SKIP command with it, or something
equivalent, so you can build IF-THEN-ELSE constructs.

I think as stated these additions would be much too powerful.  I would
certainly envision writing several thousand lines of orders every turn
(machine generated, of course), where for example every noble might do
an IF statement before every order looking for some other noble (or any
member of a large set) to do something nasty to.

I think that the lack of such commands is a deliberate attempt by the
designer to allow a calculated amount of planning ahead; enough that you
can plan for simple and likely contingencies with WAIT statements and
the like, but not enough to write detailed conditionals which permit a
single noble to be prepared to deal with myriad unlikely-but-possible
contingencies.  It's supposed to be a game, not an exercise in
programming.

Note that you say you don't want a "full-blown" programming language,
but I believe that IF and SKIP allow you to perform any realistic
activity that you could perform in such a language.  What would be loops
could be unrolled, what would be variables can be turned into jump
tables.  You can even do small-integer arithmetic.  ("If the total
weight of the items I am carrying exceeds XYZ, then ....")  Probably I
would whip up a compiler which would allow me to write my commands in a
full-featured programming language (with some sort of exception
mechanism that would allow various contingencies to cause interrupts at
different priority levels) and then would compile that into a (very,
very lengthy) IF-SKIP format.

I take back the statement about thousands of orders; I can foresee
millions.  The single macro for "Am I carrying more than XYZ weight?"
would take that many!  (Depending on how many possible types of item I
might be carrying.)

I would welcome such commands, but only if they don't unbalance the
game.  Some suggestions would be for each IF statement to require one
day to execute.  Or perhaps you would have to use one point of mana to
cast an IF spell from the Conditional Magic skill family.  1/2 :-)
Perhaps deleting those conditionals most prone to order explosion, like
UNIT and ITEM, would be enough, although I can't vouch for that without
more thought.

However it is done, there must be some disincentive to writing thousands
or millions of IF statements every turn.  (And *not* by charging real
money for each order!!)

David desJardins
--
Copyright 1994 David desJardins.  Unlimited permission is granted to quote
from this posting for non-commercial use as long as attribution is given.

References

OLYMPIA: New command ideas
morrow@gandalf.rutgers.edu (John Morrow)
Thu, 07 Jul 1994 01:42:14 +0000

Referenced By

OLYMPIA: New command ideas
morrow@gandalf.rutgers.edu (John Morrow)
Thu, 07 Jul 1994 01:42:14 +0000