[discussion] intfic language "ink"

[dcsan]

came across this and thought it might be interesting to you, it has some nice ideas.
more oriented toward point and click interactive fiction but has some nice flow-control ideas

http://docs.unfold.studio/user_guide/ink.html#part-one-the-basics

Once-only (marked with a !):

Once-only alternatives are like sequences, but when they run out of new content to display, they display nothing. (You can think of a once-only alternative as a sequence with a blank last entry.)

He told me a joke. {!I laughed politely.|I smiled.|I grimaced.|I promised myself to not react again.}

this is a big difference between rive and superscript, in that SS made an effort to track and not repeat replies to make conversations more natural.

inline conditionals

{ mood > 0:I was feeling positive enough | It was more than I could bear}.

conditionals

http://docs.unfold.studio/user_guide/ink.html#example-context-relevant-content

i much prefer this syntax to rive's stuff with * - which makes it really hard to test for multiple conditions.

=== dream ===
    {
        - visited_snakes && not dream_about_snakes:
            ~ fear++
            -> dream_about_snakes

        - visited_poland && not dream_about_polish_beer:
            ~ fear--
            -> dream_about_polish_beer

        - else:
            // breakfast-based dreams have no effect
            -> dream_about_marmalade
    }

tunnels

http://docs.unfold.studio/user_guide/ink.html#tunnels
allow you to have a piece of content that is called and returned from. more powerful than just a topic change which is like a goto. SuperScript had something like that i think with no-stay topic type
https://github.com/superscriptjs/superscript/wiki/Topics#topic-flags

[dcsan]

the runtime is in C#, i guess to make it easy to use with Unity

https://github.com/inkle/ink
https://github.com/cproctor/unfold_studio

[dcsan]

JS port of runtime
https://github.com/y-lohse/inkjs

[kirsle]

I like their syntax! The features you quoted would be good for RiveScript too and not too difficult to implement...

• Adding && and || support for *Condition would be very beneficial for RiveScript, even with the ugly ^Continue command to make it ""readable""
  • conditions = left_side.split(/(&&|\|\|)/)
  • conditions = [ "<input1> != undefined", "&&", "<input1> == <input2>" ]
  • Have the code step through the array and do what it currently does with each element. I'd probably keep it simple (read: left-to-right) so it would evaluate the first condition, and then (depending if it was truthy or falsey) decide whether or not to continue if the next element is an && (if true) or || (if false).
  • Should be backwards compatible, I don't use symbols like && and || in RiveScript that way.
• Inline conditionals could be brought to RiveScript with some unique tag syntax.
• Tunnels and once-only would require some additional storage for state variables to keep track of all this stuff. (it might be possible in RiveScript right now to: set a {topic=} and then <@> redirect to somewhere, and maybe from there set the {topic=random} back where you came from. But I think I ran into issues doing weird stuff like this in the past)
  • RiveScript wasn't designed with the use-case in mind to follow a trail of redirects and topics and re-evaluate triggers and replies along the way. Simple cases work well but the topic variable gets confused a little bit, and each time you @Redirect it essentially re-starts the reply() process while keeping exactly the same initial conditions of the reply: your input history and such are exactly the same during a redirect for example, so some uses of %Previous can get you into infinite loops currently (not too common in practice tho)

I think if I ever decide to overhaul RiveScript and add tons of new features (possibly new/changed syntax) I'll start to consolidate down to the Go version so I only have one codebase to maintain -- and Go can compile to JavaScript via GopherJS or to WebAssembly now, while also providing bindings to any other C-compatible language. Only "small features" for the 5 implementations of RiveScript for now. :)