げさく

I’ve been spending the tiny amount of free time that I have these days trying to correct several bugs in the design of the website. One of them was—you may have noticed if you have an unusually large screen—that the header image was too small for certain resolutions. It was a screenshot of my console, so it couldn’t get any bigger than my own resolution at the time, which was 1400×1050, in case you’re curious. Another was that (again, at very high screen resolutions) the banners at the bottom appeared misplaced. I first noticed these more than a year ago, so I’m sorry for not getting any work done on them until now. There are several more improvements(?), mostly changes to the stylesheet. All of them should be invisible for most of you. Continue Reading »

This is probably being one of the slowest blogs ever, but sometimes I get so carried away by an idea that I publish it without giving it enough serious thought. My previous post was one of these cases, and I want to correct that now. I’m aware that my mind functions in a non-linear fashion, and this might have confused some people, so I’ll write down how I think commercial IF might work in strict chronological order. Continue Reading »

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the issue of commercial IF lately, and I think I’ve come up with a way to make it profitable. What pleases me the most about it is, that this idea is perfectly coherent with everything that I’ve been blogging about and expressing publicly before. Continue Reading »

I recently attended the 5th International Joint Workshop on Computational Creativity. I am not in any way an expert in the field, and I had never been to a workshop before, so I didn’t know what to expect, but it turned out to be a great experience, and I think I learned a lot. This post is an account of what I saw and heard there, and also my own take on the topic. Continue Reading »

For reasons that would take too long to explain, I’m now putting the whole Gesaku system, the blog’s contents, the code (code? What code?), the documentation and anything I write, say, think or make that may be related to Gesaku under the GNU GPL version 2 or later. Why was this urgent? Because I had to make this announcement before midnight. (That’s less than three hours from now, here in Madrid.) Continue Reading »

First things first: Merry Christmas, or Hannukah (חנוכה), or Eid al-Adha (عيد الأضح), or just holidays. And now, on Gesaku-related matters, we will deal with sequences. If you know even a little about how movies are made, you’ll know what I’m talking about. When writers break up their screenplays into sequences, they do so in order to let the director and the rest of the crew know that part of the story has to be treated in some way differently than the previous or the next ones. For example, if the action goes on at night or outdoors, the cinematographer will get an idea of what kind of light shall be needed. Also, the director may get clues about how to shoot the scene. Gesaku’s sequences serve roughly the same purpose. Continue Reading »

Years ago, someone from the Spanish IF community told me that object-oriented programming was the best approach to writing interactive fiction. The reasons are not difficult to understand: a well-designed OOP language mimics the structure of the physical model you’re trying to represent. Things are easiest when your own mental image of the problem meets its written representation in the source code. Continue Reading »

And neither is Gesaku. I’m still working on it. I just was terribly busy with life. I’m sorry. I’ll spare you the gory details, which include a new day job as a programmer and an evening course on Software Engineering at the same time. Not to mention my college classes and my recent addiction to manga and anime. (Just kidding. I’m not addicted. I can control it.) Anyway, I’m mostly back and armed with new knowledge, ready to fulfill what is really my pleasure, which is to get Gesaku working, and see you using it to write and play wonderful games. Continue Reading »

Before I forget to mention it, I have spent the last few days talking to linguists and asking them about the existence of a classification of languages based on the order of the words in the sentence — also known as «predominant word order.» One of them pointed me to this Wikipedia entry, but that wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. What I’d like to find is that same classification, but applied only to imperative sentences. However, according to the people I have spoken to, such classification does not exist. That’s why I’m asking to all linguists that, hopefully, read this blog to investigate further about this issue. I don’t know if it has any application beyond helping me design a good linguistic preprocessor, but, who knows, it might be worth the try. After all, it has never been done before. Continue Reading »

In the previous post we saw — grosso modo — how grammar files would generally work. Here we will deal with more advanced topics regarding the differences between natural languages and how to define grammars for them using Gokaku, the linguistic preprocessor. Most languages are grouped in families depending on their geographical situation or their common ancestors. So we have, for example, Romance languages (which are those derived from Latin, like Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese or Romanian), Germanic languages, both Northern (Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, etc.) and Western (German, English, Dutch, etc.), Asian languages (like Chinese, Japanese and Korean), Semitic languages (Arabic or Hebrew, among others), and many more. Our approach, however, will not be geographical nor genealogical, but syntactical and morphological. Continue Reading »