I’m currently trying to write an IF game in Latin. Yes, I am crazy. Nevertheless, I feel I have the programming experience necessary to pull this off. That experience also tells me it’s best not to reinvent the wheel, so I’m trying to figure out which engine and which library to use. I’ve had a little experience with adv3 and I remember finding it pretty good on the whole, but a little bothersome at times (“Should I do this in the verify stage or a different stage? How can I fully disable dropping objects so the player never leaves anything behind?”), so I was hoping adv3Lite might address my concerns. At first glance it also looked like a smaller task to localize.
So I copy/pasted the adv3Lite code for Cloak of Darkness into a new project and started the game. I went into the dark room and…
>turn on light
You see no on light here.
Well, that’s… strange. Let’s see what else might be wrong with turn on/off. After exiting the dark room:
[code]>turn on
If you want to go somewhere, use one of the compass directions (NORTH, EAST, SW, W, S etc). From here you could go north, south or west.
turn off
You see no off here.[/code]
(EDIT: adv3 gives the same response to “turn off” with no object specified. So that one isn’t specific to adv3lite, but the rest are.)
I also found that, whenever you score a point, the game prints “(Your score has just increased by one point. )”, with an extra space before the close paren. None of these issues seem to be due to the code in Cloak of Darkness.
I encountered these issues in just a few minutes of playing my first adv3Lite game. Yes, these issues are probably easy to fix; that is not the problem. The problem is, if I’m running into these issues so soon, what else is wrong? This isn’t even getting into the issues I’ve come across with localization, as I don’t expect localization features to be quite finished yet.
Is the adv3Lite library full of stuff like this or did I just get absurdly unlucky and run into the few minor issues in an otherwise solid library?
(Note: I don’t mean to knock Eric Eve or his work at all. I understand that a library like this is a big undertaking – after all, that’s why I’m not doing it myself! I’m only concerned with how polished the library is in its current state.)