For twelve years now I've kinda wanted to learn perl, looked at a cople of times, there's a book here with a camel on it... Now it looks like I'll actually get into it. Thanks!
Got it running, but you may need a more involved help file. I can see where the crew are, and after a few false starts I figured out how to move them around, but they just teleport, there's no limit on movement.
I need more help with the command syntax, too. I typed GE for grow eggs, but there are still eggs everywhere. I type GE roffi to grow the eggs in the office, but there are still eggs there afterward. Did I hit the limit of the countermix?
Some of the commands are interactive, like LS, while others require all the inputs on the command line, like MC. So I'm lost.
This is more like a tool then a complete game. You are supposed to follow the rules for moving the crew. To lets say you want to move Captain Yid and Sparks from the Bridge to the supply room.
>enter>>>>mc yid spk to rcorb rcarg rstor
Now there is a bit of reason why some commands require arguments, and other do not. As I was playing it, I how painful it would be to move crew. Imagine if you will... mc (move crew) give me a crew name: yid any more? yes give me a crew name: spk any more? no where to they start? rbrdg1 do they go to roffi? no do they go to rcorb? yes after that do they go to rcora? no do they go to rcarg? yes after that do.....ARGH.
How I played it was this way. I figured out where all the crew was and where they were going. I wrote on paper (or text file), the commands to move them. Then I ran all the commands at once.
After a while, I got tired of this typing. So I ran the command to show all green things and show all crew, then ran it without the computer at that point. I thought to myself, gee this program is kind of hard to use. But I could always expand on it, it does have some AI in the monsters, and I could use it to keep things hidden for longer than expected. (Which really worked in my playtest.)
I wanted to work on making it more user friendly, but I realized it was just sitting for a month. So I submitted my working version.
Different subject: Now about grow eggs and such, if there are no more "kids", the eggs will remain, just like in the game.
Oh and about the camel book? If you are just starting out, go get "learning perl", or google for tutorials. You can get perl for windows through a website called ActiveState.
I haven't looked at the program yet, but it sounds like it works by command line. Have you thought about adding a GUI to it using PerlTK? I only looked into Perl for a short time, but GUIs seemed to be very easy to set up.
Yes. I do want to switch it to perl/tk for gui. But easy? Sometimes it becomes a massive endeavor. If you have perl/tk run "widget" to see some of the stuff out there. In this case, I don't know how long it would take. It would take a lot of time to draw the pieces.
And I don't want to break any copyrights. I would rather have goofy programs of mine help and not hurt sales of any old game.
