I'm having fun rigging up my 'talking mode' thing.
Basically the user experience is, you type 'hello bob!', ego moves to a specific area and you get the message "Hi, bob!" over ego's head. Bob replies, and now the input bar (which previously says "Action:") says "Say:", the mouse cursor changes to a speech bubble, and you can no longer move the ego, just enter typed commands, phrased as questions. (eg: "Where is the shop?" "How are you feeling?" "How do I get the dog into the hanging basket?" etc)
This is all going pretty well, although I'm realising why Sierra generally didn't have a lot of dialogue in their SCI.0 games, these room scripts get big pretty fast! Probably I'll end up turning these conversations into modules so that the conversations can be totally different at later times in the game.
There's also a bunch of global variables so the game knows if you've seen, said, or learned something to open up more dialogue options, kind of like a dialogue tree.
basically it's all broken into 'where, how, when, what' sections, with some 'anyword/noun' ones for statements ("the dog is hungry"). This is all going fine, but the only one I have trouble with is "is" statements, eg "Is it hot in here", "Is Joey stupid" etc. The parser does not like sentences which start with "is" for some reason, no matter how much I meddle with the vocab resource. Any ideas why this could be?
