Random cycling text: what's a good limit?

[Laroquod]

P.S. I never answered the thread title: ‘what’s a good limit?’ I can’t put an exact number to it, but to replicate what a human might sound like repeating things with slight variations, I found looping to the beginning after 3 to 5 steps was usually enough to make it sound like a human might in the same situation. Two is really too few. More than five probably works but might begin to sound like a thesaurus (human beings don’t vary their repetitions THAT much- only slightly, adding little intros like ‘No,’ or extros like ‘, man’). But when it’s not just a style and adding actual variant content like book titles, I’m not sure there is a limit besides the developer’s patience for not-directly-relevant detail.

[vaporware]

I think if you edit a post quickly enough after submitting it, it won’t record edit history, so maybe that’s what happened here.

[Draconis]

Another innovation from Wreck My Car that you’ll also see in my WIPs is Instant Restart. I dispensed with all that Restart, Restore, Quit nonsense. Death leads immediately to the next play’s opening text. This is the way I will always do things, but it’s a huge pain in the ass to code that way because it means I have to fake-end the game, instead of truly ending it, which means I have to reset all the variables manually, and some Inform 7 variables are not easily susceptible to manual resetting, as I believe I mentioned in another thread.

There are some easier ways to do it if you’re interested (though sadly none of them are perfect). For example:

When play ends: resume the story.

This makes play continue from the same place as though it hadn’t ended. In a one-move game that might be acceptable, since that one move doesn’t necessarily affect the game state. You could also do:

When play ends: try restarting the game.

This just does a hard reset back to the initial state. If you want to keep some things the same you can save them to an external file; if you just want things to change slightly each time you can use my Play Counter extension to see how many times the game has been started/ended/ended finally.

[AndrewS]

if you just want things to change slightly each time you can use my Play Counter extension to see how many times the game has been started/ended/ended finally.

Ooh! I’ll have to check that out.

And I like the idea of letting the player know that the error message is, indeed, generic, by slowly gradating it from “you don’t think there’s anything there” to “nope, nothing’s there.” I think there’s some range for humor etc. too.

[Draconis]

[quote=“AndrewS, post:24, topic:178”]

if you just want things to change slightly each time you can use my Play Counter extension to see how many times the game has been started/ended/ended finally.

Ooh! I’ll have to check that out.[/quote]
It developed out of a need to track paradoxes in the time-travel puzzles in Spirals. The game uses an auto-save/auto-restore behind the scenes to implement the world resetting itself after you break reality, and the play counter keeps the text moving every time this happens.

And I like the idea of letting the player know that the error message is, indeed, generic, by slowly gradating it from “you don’t think there’s anything there” to “nope, nothing’s there.” I think there’s some range for humor etc. too.

Agreed. I’m tempted to add some of that into Scroll Thief.

[Hanon]

I wish “Instant Restart” was an extension. I would totally use it in my WIP.

And I also like the idea of “slightly randomized error text” to avoid a robotic parser.