[Adonthell-general] Dialog engine and Fame (Was: Re: New map engine implementation started! :))

[Alexandre Courbot]

> I'm currently fighting with rpm, but I'll go back to coding soon. Am just
> a bit unsure what to do: improve the dialogue system or schedules, or do
> some work on the item/combat/magic front.

The schedules are fine for now, I'd say - better to improve them once we
have something else to move with (i.e the New Ass Kicking Map System).

About the dialogs, you might want to to improve them a bit after reading
what follows.

I had a discussion with my local LUG's president because he's very
interested in dlgedit and the dialog engine in general. He's currently
working into a European program to get Free Software more used in
education - and what interests him in the dialog engine is that it's
capable to remind what the user said and did to propose him relevant
sentences. From what I understood (I might be a bit wrong there) he'd
like to plug it into an existing web-based scholar program, as an help
system and others things, which would be technically very possible and
simple.

After having a look at the game and the editors, he is very enthousiast
about it - and it might well be that he'll use it. But for this purpose
he'd need the dialog engine to be internationalized. As a "reward" for
doing this, some people of the team would be invited (trip paid, and so
on) to big Linux related meetings in order to talk & demonstrate this
system, like the libre software meetings in Bordeaux, for example. Also
consider some Euros reward as possible if there is some extra work
needed and you agree to do it - but I won't go too far on this side.

I'm talking about this only now (discussions started about two weeks
ago) because chances are that it will happen. Discussions are going on,
and the dialog engine really seems to be what they need (especially
dlgedit which is a very handy tool - actually it's thanks to it that the
dialog engine might be reused). Moreover, as I said, it's totally
independant of the rest of the game, so pluging it somewhere else is
really no problem. Internationalizing would IMO be best done by using
gettext and .po file - have to check here how much Python likes gettext.
This is anyway something we would have done soon or later, I think - and
not so hard, I believe. Maybe you'll want to throw a look at this
direction, Kai.

If this happens, that would be a great opportunity to get known and meet
lots of interesting people.

The moral is, when you develop an engine of any sort, never forget to
provide good and user friendly tools to create data for it, or you might
miss good opportunities! (see
http://adonthell.linuxgames.com/screenshot/closeup.shtml?9 , I hate you,
Kai! ;))

Well well - tell me what you think, Kai.

Alex.
-- 
http://www.gnurou.org