Showing posts with label text parser. Show all posts
Showing posts with label text parser. Show all posts

Saturday, 1 February 2014

AIF Player's Guide

Traditionally, AIF meant an adult game with a text parser (ie. where the player types out what they want to do). The somewhat peculiar vocabulary and syntax understood by the text parser has its origins in the commercial text adventures of the early 80s. These games were designed to run on as little as 16k of memory, so unsurprisingly they were only able to understand a limited number of words. Things have improved since, and today's text parsers are able to recognise comparatively complex sentences. However, the core vocabulary has remained the same and most AIF games assume that the player is already familiar with it. Obviously that isn't going to be the case for people new to AIF, which is why this guide has been written.