AGiliTy - Not quite so agile, perhaps?

                An article from Bev Truter

Re playing AGT text adventures by converting them into AGiliTy,
most of the AGT games I've done this with have run fine, but
definitely not 'Cardi' or Jack of Hartz, or Lyn's Sir Arthur game.
I felt sooo thwarted, as I had a thorough go at converting all 3
games into AGiliTy, both by combining the original data files into
a single .AGT file as suggested for writing new games from
scratch, and then compiling it; and also by converting the
already-compiled AGT versions of the games into AGiliTy by using
AGT2AGX. Everything compiled easily and looked fine, but certainly
did not play properly! In the case of JoH and Arthur, one of the
first tasks is to climb a tree. Hrrmmph. Perfectly easy and
feasible in AGT, but AGiliTy just spat out the classic phrase YOU
CAN'T DO THAT. I struggled over and over with re-writing and re-
checking and re-compiling and re-testing, but nope, that tree
still remained totally unclimbable in AGiliTy....looks like it's
not quite as agile as the old AGT. As the tree is in the first
location in both games and you need to climb it to get something,
I gave up after a week of battling with AGiliTy and went back to
AGT.

'Still Laughing at my Cardigan' seemed to run OK using AGiliTy,
until I got around to talking to game characters - an essential
part of Cardi is to talk to the policeman, to get clues and some
vital info. For some odd reason, all the characters in Cardi lost
their marbles under AGiliTy, and the standard AGT/AGX message
would kick in with THERE IS NO REPLY. I don't know if Cardi is
finishable using AGility, I was so annoyed with the "talk to" bug
that I gave up and reprogrammed Cardi using good old AGT instead.
Part of the problem might have been due to me mucking about with
the verbs TALK and SPEAK in the AGT .CMD file - I remember making
speak to, say to and whisper (to) all synonyms for "talk to";
where the original AGT verbs have TALK and SAY as 2 different
verbs - ie, "talk to someone" is structured differently to "say
hello". However, everything ran perfectly with AGT, it was just
AGiliTy that objected to conversing with people in any way. So if
anyone wants to play any of these 3 games, they might be better
off using one of the slow-down programs rather than converting the
AGT games into AGiliTy.

Where AGiliTy certainly did come in handy was in playing the only
AGT entry in the Competition 2000 games on the Net, a very simple
game called VOID which used the Standard version of AGT and very
basic programming with only a teensy-weensy .CMD file. The
competition organizers supplied the compiled AGT game files minus
the RUN.EXE run-time engine, so the only way to play it was to
convert it into AGiliTy, which worked beautifully. So maybe it's
just bad luck that both Lyn and I have had such troubles with
AGiliTy; or maybe it's because we used AGTBIG and had very large
.CMD files.






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