Hello!
What IF language would you recommend for complex path finding?
(By “complex” I mean based on an epistemological model, i.e. each NPC has their own understanding of the game world and finds the optimal path based on their personal knowledge.)
Will the player be typing commands or clicking links?
(I don’t have a suggestion either way, but the answer to that question is definitely going to affect which language you want…)
Definitely typing. So I need a parser.
By the way, is this the usual amount of traffic on intfiction.org, or are people enjoying the summer outdoors?
About typical. There’s more activity on the competition forums during the big competition.
One of Inform’s core strengths is that you can straightforwardly get NPCs to do anything the player can do. It contains documentation for implementing NPC knowledge states and path finding.
Off the top of my head, Inform 7 is very good for modelling relations, and has multiple pathfinding algorithms built in.
ADRIFT keeps track of which locations an NPC has visited and which objects it has seen, and you can use http://wiki.adrift.co/Restrictions to check this knowledge.
There is a discussion here of how to do complex route-finding, in this case how to determine if the player is in their line-of-sight in any direction and move the NPC towards them if so.
I provide an example game in my (saabie) post, but you will need the ADRIFT runner to try it, and the ADRIFT developer to see how it works.
It is also possible to preset several paths that the NPC should follow, and things that they should do along the way, choosing different paths as things change in the game.
I’d use Inform 7 - but admittedly, I7 is my go-to for anything parser.
With that said, it’s pretty darn powerful and can absolutely handle what you’re describing.