Do the rules allow IF libraries?

georgek on 2011/03/31 14:34
— edited on 2011/03/31 14:35

Not too sure about this so I wanted to ask about it. According to the rules the "libraries must not implement any game logic". I'd like to use an IF library (Curveship). IF libraries typically implement common world actions (such as get, drop, etcetera). 

Is it OK to use IF libraries, and if not, is it OK to use them just for their text generation and parsing abilities, and just not use the world actions they model? In a certain sense these actions are like the physics of the game world, which are implemented in some libraries used for graphical games here. Thoughts?

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Comments

gcewing on 2011/03/31 21:25:

I think that rule is talking about code relating to a specific game. IF libraries should be fine, since they're just tools for producing games of a certain style.

adam on 2011/04/02 21:21:

I think the world-modelling and action-modelling component of most IF libraries falls afoul of the "must not implement any game logic" rule. I don't know anything about Curveship specifically, but I'm pretty sure that the game logic rule precludes, for example, using a platform engine library (although it's fine to use a physics library on which you build the platform engine).

If it's easy to separate the parsing component of Curveship from the world model, I expect that's fine, but I guess they may be quite tightly bound due to disambiguation, etc.

gcewing on 2011/04/02 22:00:

If you're going to rule out IF libraries on the grounds that they implement "game logic" (whatever that rather ill-defined term means) then you would also have to rule out the likes of Ogre and Panda3D, which provide a roughly equivalent level of support for game building in the 3D genre.

adam on 2011/04/03 06:42:

Maybe I'm used to IF libraries that do more than Curveship, or I don't understand what Ogre and Panda3D are capable of, but really? Do you not still have to write code for how the player avatar (or whatever) interacts with the world?