My So Called Interactive Fiction Life

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David A Cornelson

GenAI is both Popular and Unpopular

To no one's surprise, a lot of people using GenAI for anything get quite a bit of negative and sometimes abusive feedback. I've stated this other places, but want to share my feelings on the matter. Art, Video, Audio, and Narrative Text It's clear

The Parser is Language Specific

Now sure if this is true in other platforms like Inform or TADS, but while designing Sharpee it became clear that the Parser makes a ton of assumptions about vocabulary and command structure that are directly tied to the language the author is using to tell their interactive story. I

Is it Core or Capability?

In the midst of testing the platform (everything is building and Core, IF Domain, Event Processor, World Model, lang-en-us, Standard Library, and Engine all compile), there were some actions without clear implementations. For scoring, where do we keep that data? In the player entity? In the world model at some

ADRs (Architecture Decision Records)

I've copied the ADRs to the GitHub repository. You can view them here: https://github.com/ChicagoDave/sharpee/issues

ADR 014 - Unrestricted World Model Access

So we ran into a goofy problem that would only happen in a modern architecture. Encapsulation is something IF development has rarely adhered to and Sharpee leans into it. The event source and spatial indexing (the implemented world model) have event-based interfaces and you currently can't change things

Integration Testing Exposes Flaw

So far the unit testing had gone very smoothly. The architecture was holding up. Until we got to the integration testing, there were no major flaws. But these last tests showed a shallow, but wide problem in our entities. We had been using the name as the id, but that

World Model Testing Pt 1.

There were some challenges here, specifically visibility. I have about 10 ADRs (Architecture Decision Records) that I'll share that address complex issues like lighting. We implemented a baseline standard isDark lighting system and this can be replaced with future extensions. PASS tests/unit/world/visibility-behavior.test.ts (18.

Sharpee Platform Architecture

Is very nearly complete. I have a baseline story (Cloak of Darkness) somewhat working as expect. Enough to believe the architecture is solid. So how do we prove it outside of a big game? Unit testing. I have completed unit test suites for the packages Core, Event Processor, and am

Sharpee's Architecture Solidifies

Rewind A little over three years ago I started playing around with elements of a new IF Platform built in C#. The vision included a graph data store, text service, and not much else. Then when ChatGPT arrived, I was able to make some progress, especially learning new patterns, but

Sharpee: Process an IF turn entirely Without Text

As I develop Sharpee, one design decision has clarified significantly. During the processing of a turn, the system won't generate or "print" any text. None. But wait Dave! This IS an interactive (text) fiction authoring thing you're building, right? Yes, but is streaming print