Re:Writing web-based interactive fiction with Ink
by anthk on Friday April 30, 2021 @01:56AM
(#26990211)
If I was Plotkin I'd use prolog for that :), that's just a graph node-dependency check.
Re:Writing web-based interactive fiction with Ink
by WorldMaker on Friday April 30, 2021 @11:58AM
(#26995151)
I assume it was a combo of familiarity and also related to whichever mechanisms Zarf was extracting world states graphs from Inform 7 and/or Z-Machines. (I haven't read the blog posts in a while, and obviously Zarf's blog is blocked on this work laptop because technical discussions about games can't possibly~ have technical insight into work.)
You can graph dependency graphs and state machine graphs to try to look for bad patterns or unwinnable cases visually.
In one interesting extreme example Andrew Plotkin put a ton of work into building python tools to build the puzzle dependency graph of Hadean Lands to hard prove them (in the style of mathematical proofs) and make sure they didn't contain unaccounted for unwinnable states. Plotkin blogged a lot about that during the development of Hadean Lands.