TGC - Text Game Compiler

             Taken from a letter from Joel Finch

@~Some time ago, I wrote to Joel Finch (author of The
@~Multi-Dimensional Thief and co-author of Whatever We Decide to
@~call This Game) in Australia to see if he was interested in
@~being interviewed for PC Mart ... but that's another story. In
@~his letter, he told me that he was working on a new PC text game
@~creation kit called TGC and sent me an Alpha test version to
@~have a look at. It impressed the heck out of me so I asked him
@~if I could tell you about it ... he said yes ... so here are the
@~details as they stand at the moment, with some paraphrasing from
@~his letter.

TGC allows games which have:

* Text and graphics on the same screen, with facilities for
clickable buttons and a compass rose, as well as SVGA support.

* Mouse support to allow common sentences to be entered without
typing, including the ability to select any word from the game
text.

* Full editing keys, definable function and arrow keys and 20 line
previous-input buffer in the same style as DOSKey.

* Soundblaster support.

And as far as the actual gameplay goes:

* Actions, objects and connective strings which can be made up of
multiple words ie 'jump over' is the action 'brown mouldy chair'
is the object, 'in general direction of' is the connective string.
Each of the actions, items and connectives has a maximum total of
64K, allowing, for example, approximately 4000 action strings to
be defined or 4000 object names. Each of these can have as many
synonyms as necessary (within the 64K limit) eg get, take, pick
up, steal, acquire, grab, accept etc.

* An optional repetition part of the sentence eg jump five times.

* Facilities for commanding other characters: 'tell the man to go
north and push the red button twice'.

* Support for 'except' as in 'get everything except the bowl'.
The TGC kit itself will have a Turbo-C style editor, allowing the
designer to compile and run without leaving the editor. A full
manual on disk will also be part of the package, with a printed
version available to registered users.

Basically Joel says he has set out to 'write the king of all text
game creators.' TGC contains very little that is fixed. The screen
layout is at the command of the designer. If they want to have a
status bar at the top, they can. No bar, fine. Or an inventory
window, or a list of useful words, or a picture of the room, or a
compass rose to indicate valid directions ... The only fixed
messages are the ones dealing with extreme errors ie disk seek
fail, general failure error etc. Items can have as many or as few
attributes as needed so if the designer needs to record that the
chair has four legs or that the cake can be eaten, they simply add
an appropriate attribute.

Because it is written in assembly, TGC turns out games that are
considerably smaller than most other systems in terms of both disk
and memory requirements. Thief, which Joel is currently rewriting
using TGC, compiles to about half the size of its AGT equivalent
(without the pictures, of course) and will run in as little as
200K. In the completed version, TGC will produce one single .EXE
file for a finished game. If the designer adds pictures, this will
add one more file, and music/sound will add another.

Joel has been working on TGC for over 10 months and plans to
release it as shareware. The planned release date is currently
the end of November. The shareware version will not contain the
modules necessary to display pictures, activate the graphics
buttons or play music in the background via Soundblaster. However,
since TGC has a facility to run any other program, the shareware
version can still be used to display pictures, make noise etc,
just not on the same screen as the text, or in the background in
the case of music. This means that the freely-available shareware
version will be equivalent to the current registered version of
AGT; capable of creating good TEXT games. Graphics and sound will
be the incentive for people to register and hopefully generate
some money so he can continue with his programming.

@~Well, that's the news so far. TGC is VERY impressive, even in
@~the Alpha version. As I hear more from Joel, I'll let you know
@~how the program progresses.