/README -*- rst; coding: utf-8 -*- Introduction ------------ ċWhat you are looking at is a web interface to a text adventure engine I am developing. This has been my weekend project since one saturday afternoon in February 2007, when I decided to re-learn Prolog. The engine adds a feature I was missing most in the text adventure games I played when I was a kid: *autocompletion* and *synonyms*. I remember it being most frustrating to know what you want to achieve, but having no idea whatsoever what a particular item or action was called by the developer of the game. My engine tries to minimize these problems. Implementation Notes -------------------- The Adventure engine is implemented in Prolog. The language parser is written as a DCG (definite clause grammar) rules. Thanks to Prolog's unusual execution model a rule in Prolog can be executed in any direction. This means that once the language's grammar is specified we can throw a string of user input to it and it will return properly tokenized abstract syntax, but we can also give it an incomplete list of tokens and query for all valid completions that would yield a legal sentence. In fact, due to the way it is implemented, it will only return completions that make sense in the current context (eg., take⇥ will only return objects that the avatar can actually pick up and that are in the current room, not any noun that would be grammatically correct in that position). To be fair, the search space for the reverse execution of the grammar is much larger than the one for forward execution, so there are some rules (cf. the definition of ``noun/2`` in ``advcore2.pl``) that are technically redundant, but prune the search tree during backwards execution, so we can generate answers fast enough. The synonym feature uses the famous Princeton WordNet database of synonyms for the English language, which thankfully is readily available as a Prolog database. One ramification of this is that the game programmer needs to specify the actual meaning of each word that is used in the game using the synonym index number. To help with this process there is the ``synonyms.pl`` query frontend that returns all known definitions of a given word. Browsing through the WordNet database can actually be an enlightening experience about how we as humans process our language. There is no game!? ------------------ Right, and I'm sorry about that. I realized that I enjoy working on the engine much more than working on the game, and I begin to suspect that there is an entirely different skill set necessary to write compelling games. There's the demo room, though. But you can't do much there. Maybe one day I can at least port somebody else's existing game to the new engine -- even if it is "Pick up the phone booth and die". References ---------- These are some of the sources that a drew my inspirations from: Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction http://nickm.com/twisty/ Nick Montfort, The MIT Press, 2003. Get Lamp: a documentary about adventures in text http://www.getlamp.com/ Jason Scott, DVD, 2010. ADVENT http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/programs/advent.w.gz> Donald R. Woods and Donald E. Knuth, Literate Program, Stanford University, 1998. Put My Galakmid Coin into the Dispenser and Kick It: Computational Linguistics and Theorem Proving in a Computer Game http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/B:JLLI.0000024734.80591.30> Alexander Koller, Ralph Debusmann, Malte Gabsdil und Kristina Striegnitz, Journal of Logic, Language and Information, Volume 13, Number 2, Kluwer 2004. Adventure in Prolog http://www.amzi.com/AdventureInProlog/ Amzi! inc., 1990. Casting SPELs in LISP: a comic book http://lisperati.com/casting.html> Conrad Barski, Lisperati, 2006?. WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ Princeton University, 2007. Discussion on Slashdot that possibly sparked the idea: http://games.slashdot.org/story/04/02/26/2334203/magic-words---interactive-fiction-in-the-21st-century Copyright and Licensing ----------------------- see also LICENSE. Copyright © 2007-2012 Adrian Prantl This file is part of Adventure. Adventure is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. Adventure is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with Adventure. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/. Bundled 3rd-Party Software -------------------------- For convenience, there are some 3rd-party packages bundled with Adventure in the contrib/ subdirectory. They come with their own licensing terms: * Scriptaculous: MIT License * WordNet This software and database is being provided to you, the LICENSEE, by Princeton University under the following license. By obtaining, using and/or copying this software and database, you agree that you have read, understood, and will comply with these terms and conditions.: Permission to use, copy, modify and distribute this software and database and its documentation for any purpose and without fee or royalty is hereby granted, provided that you agree to comply with the following copyright notice and statements, including the disclaimer, and that the same appear on ALL copies of the software, database and documentation, including modifications that you make for internal use or for distribution. WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved. THIS SOFTWARE AND DATABASE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND PRINCETON UNIVERSITY MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. BY WAY OF EXAMPLE, BUT NOT LIMITATION, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF MERCHANT- ABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR THAT THE USE OF THE LICENSED SOFTWARE, DATABASE OR DOCUMENTATION WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY THIRD PARTY PATENTS, COPYRIGHTS, TRADEMARKS OR OTHER RIGHTS. The name of Princeton University or Princeton may not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the software and/or database. Title to copyright in this software, database and any associated documentation shall at all times remain with Princeton University and LICENSEE agrees to preserve same.
adrian-prantl/adventure
an advanced text adventure engine with a web interface, written in prolog
PrologAGPL-3.0