Plain Text Commands?

[flourride]

Not the best title, but....

I hope you guys will be patient, this may all seem a bit stupid!

My military history interests centre around 1914-15, the small wars of the 1920's and 1939-41.

My wargaming experience tends to zero. I played around with TOAW and found it a bit un-inspiring, and was wildly impressed by the Prosim stable (wrong period, I know). I downloaded their Falklands demo and found the level of detail amazing, but I just CANNOT get on with clicking and dragging.

I have a hunch that if one could overlay that sort of engine with the ability to input orders in plain text - eg "X Bn, Y Regt will retire through Z village and establish a position on the line of the River A", one might begin to work towards something which would give a real feel for the problems of Bn or Div command in period.....

The potential for modelling comms breakdowns, logistic problems, etc. could be huge and fascinating!

Several ways the discussion could go, I guess:

Does this exist?

Is it a complete dead duck as a concept?

If not, would anyone feel like joining forces to try and develop something?

(Caveat - my programming abilities are to zero and my thinking tends to the brilliant but disorganized)! On the other hand, I can see a huge upswing of interest in the period over the 100th anniversary -so there might just be commercial potential if one could produce something really amazing.

Really looking forward to hearing what y'all have to say on this.

[Cicero]

Over my head. I was thinking of the DOS command line

[SRV Ron]

Text command games were some of the first concepts in early role playing turn based game. The programming concept was for the game to accept an input, and execute the command. Writing the program command lines was quite easy. It uses the concept of string input and comparing the contents of that string with a set string data to look for a match. A simple counting loop could be used to go through an array of string data to find a match. When a match was found, the program jumped to the program line that corresponded the count number of the loop. If no match was found, the program informed the user of the error and reset back to accept another command. Early games, such as Oregon Trail, Mystery House, and early versions of Dungeon and Dragons, use the text command concept.

Such early programming was limited to cryptic one or two word commands that has to be spelled exactly. Later programs could ignore caps and extra characters by looking for keywords.

There is no reason why a well written game couldn't use voice commands via a speech to text engine converter to control the output. Many automated phone tree systems already do so.

[flourride]

Thanks - that's great and confirmed what I thought, which is that it's technically not very difficult.

What sort of direction should I go in if I'm looking at trying to make this work as a project - probably just a fun project, but you never know!

Can you think of any other forums where I'm likely to find people who may be thinking along roughly the same lines?

[SRV Ron]

I should also mention that, with Windows 8 and the touch screen tablets, games can be programmed to react to touch screen inputs as well as voice commands. The programming itself should be easy since the touch screen is based upon an x-y input window where your finger acts as the mouse arrow location using a left click to select.

Example of a simple programming outline, send selected brigade to selected location. The selected brigade can be an actual unit and the location an actual location on the game map. The work is in designing the graphics and animations, eye candy, that gets activated by those commands. The rest are just database statistics along with game variables such as weather, logistics, terrain, and enemy resistance, that controls what happens as those units move to their selected destination.

I haven't kept track of what is available in the Microsoft world in programming languages. My last serious programming was done with a basic compiler that worked with the Amiga computer where I was experimenting with text based games along with mouse selection in a prototype 3-D world complete with graphics. Later programming was constructing a real world route in the 50s for Microsoft Train Simulator. That involved the use of a graphic editor to design structures, textures from a paint programs, and some C+ programming to troubleshoot problems in the route.

Do a web search for windows programming language to see what is out there. There are some free basic programming languages available where you could experiment in writing a text based game. After all, the graphics are just eye candy that can always be added later.

[SRV Ron]

To get started, you can download and install Microsoft Small Basic. It should do the job of the text commands while having graphic capability. Later, you can advance to Visual Basic or C++.


Small Basic combines a friendly environment with a very simple language and a rich and engaging set of libraries to make your programs and games pop. In a matter of few lines of code, you will be well on your way to creating your very own game!
With a new and revolutionary IntelliSense®, Small Basic makes writing code a breeze.

http://smallbasic.com/