Previously, we created a “User Action” which demonstrated how our interpreter could map out a sentence. In this lesson we will expand the concept of an action with some reusable classes. Then we will implement a few actions which are actually intended to be used by the game. By the end of this lesson you will be able to interact with the mailbox in your starting room by opening or closing it. This also means we will actually be modifying some data in the database for the first time.
Month: October 2016
Zork – Targeting
Our interpreter system has succeeded in converting words to actions and objects. However it is still only providing candidate matches. There are a variety of reasons why we may need to filter or disregard those results based on other game constraints. For example, even though the interpreter might understand the word “leaflet”, you still shouldn’t consider it a valid object to interact with unless your player can actually see it. It could be in a different room, or could be located in a closed mailbox, etc. In this lesson, we will provide a way to help validate our object targets.
Zork – Interpreter
One of the biggest challenges of this project is trying to create a flexible system that can understand the English language. How do I get the computer to understand that certain words relate to certain actions and objects when there are so many possible configurations of words to use?
Zork – Data Manager
In this lesson we will start by creating a class to manage the connection to our database. Then we will create a few models to represent the data we want to work with. Once all of that is in place, we will finish by creating a short demo that will allow us to grab an entity by typing its ID. The demo will then tell us information about our entity such as its label and the kinds and counts of the components it contains.
Zork – Game Screen
In this post we will begin the first real step of the project as we create the game screen – this will consist of a simple text field for user input and a scrollable text view showing the history of messages throughout the game. I will go in-depth on the description of code for the view controller as well as the manager object that records the message history. When we complete this lesson, you should be able to type messages into the text field and see them get appended to the log of messages in the text view.