/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
    
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