Tutorial Trials and Tribulations

[Nivm]

(To Abelia)
Can I start the tutorial?
I'd like to start the tutorial, please.
May I start the tutorial?
Could I please begin the tutorial?
May I begin the tutorial?
Can I begin the tutorial?
Could I please start the tutorial?  (And Abelia Aruine finally responsed apporpriately!)

(To Abelia)
I'm ready.
Alright.
Fine.
Yes! Curse you.  (There we go.)

(Ditto.)
Yes.

(Ditto.)
I'm ready.
I'm ready, please start.
I am ready!
Ready.
Ready, curse you. (I can hope.)
I let you know I am ready. (I'm now trying to quote the character better.)
I have let you know I am ready.
I did that.
It is done.
It is done, please continue.
Just yes, demonspawn! (I can do this to things without feelings, it worked.)

(Ditto.)
I'm ready? Please? (Awesome! It worked first time.)

(To Neave.)
Lady Abelia sent me.
Abelia sent me.
ABelia Aruine sent me. (Does it care where caps are? It could use that to determine what's a name.)
Miss Abelia sent me. (Went back and read it again.)

(Back to Abelia; may she be rewritten.)
Could you please give me your tainted blacksmithing book? (Yes, I deserved failure that time.)
Could you please give me the blacksmithing book?
Could you please give me your blacksmithing book? (Nar!)
Give me your book.
Give me your blacksmithing book. (Arg!)
Do you have a book for me?
Neave wants her blacksmithing book.
I am fetching Neave's blacksmithing book.
Do you have a blacksmithing book?
Do you have Neave's blacksmithing book?
You have a book I'm supposed to get; give it to me.
May your mind experience a swift explosion followed by being built from the ground up.
Give me Neave's book.
Give me Neave's blacksmithing book.
May I have Neave's blacksmithing book?
Am I supposed to murder you?
It seems plausible.
Could you please give me Neave's blacksmithing book?
Book of blacksmithing; I want it. Now.
I just now discovered I can walk through you at will.
Do you know, that you have Neave's blacksmithing book?
Neave wants her blacksmithing book back. So do I.
As you are a teacher; how do I kick you in the shins?
I would like you to give me the blacksmithing book, please?
(Then my father kicked me off; no success.)

 Anywho, it would be nice if the NPC incomprehension messages were condensed after the first time. Although my main problem here is the fact that I don't know what the NPC is looking for.

What I'm saying is if a person does not have the facilities to get though this simple tutorial then they should not be let in - the game will be too difficult for them and most likely unpleasant for both them and those who encounter them.

So apparently I do not have simple facilities?

 Had to work a bit with failed keybindings and a left-right distinction problem; but that system is very good. Why doesn't the keybinding page on the main client display anything?
 The FAQ thread says that mental stamina is used for mining and fighting, but wouldn't it be more important for a stressful ritual spell or getting through a 20 page math test? Just a typo?
 Why is there no mention of the wiki in the manual, the FAQ, or the starting guides? It's useful for dispelling confusion, and it seems to be of general knowledge; the stuff your character is supposed to know.

Edit: Oh, and...

Right click on the NPC and you will see a list things that you can say.
Click the choice that you want from the list.

Easy squeezy

Never. I'm going to get it right without cheating.

[Roled]

When I first went through the tutorial I was lucky to have a friend who knew PS sitting next to me translating..

the most useful command I was taught- that I would never have thought of on my own most likely- is the /about command

/about blacksmithing book
/about book
/give book
/give me book
/about Windowless tower
/about Xiosia

it has saved me many a time... Good luck friend!
Yers,

Roled Rolak
not the sharpest time-teller in the Dome

[Rigwyn]

What I'm saying is if a person does not have the facilities to get though this simple tutorial then they should not be let in - the game will be too difficult for them and most likely unpleasant for both them and those who encounter them.

So apparently I do not have simple facilities?

 Had to work a bit with failed keybindings and a left-right distinction problem; but that system is very good. Why doesn't the keybinding page on the main client display anything?
 The FAQ thread says that mental stamina is used for mining and fighting, but wouldn't it be more important for a stressful ritual spell or getting through a 20 page math test? Just a typo?
 Why is there no mention of the wiki in the manual, the FAQ, or the starting guides? It's useful for dispelling confusion, and it seems to be of general knowledge; the stuff your character is supposed to know.

Edit: Oh, and...

Right click on the NPC and you will see a list things that you can say.
Click the choice that you want from the list.

Easy squeezy

Never. I'm going to get it right without cheating.

I stand firmly behind everything I said. This tutorial is very easy to get though unless of course you have legitimate technical issues that prevent the client from working as it should. Trust me when I say this. The tutorial is a small sample of what the rest of the game is like. If you find the tutorial to be so hard that you need a manual to tell you what to do, or if the level of difficulty frustrates you to tears, then rest assured, the rest of the game will be the same but worse.

By the way, right clicking the npc and clicking on the quest responses is not cheating. This is the new way to do quests. The old way ( typing in the npc dialog ) may not work. Save yourself some time and use the new system .Right click the npc, and then on the mouth. There are a few occasions where you need to type something in like yes or no.

[weltall]

you are doing it wrong.
quest are all menu driven now so right click on the npc and select the mouth, plus your complicated phrases are difficult to be parsed by a computer. due to a bug being fixed the old questing way could be readded but still won't be able to understand most of your elaborated phrases.
as for roled you don't use / in front of those

[verden]

Its amazing how in all those phrases, very basic combinations were not listed. Nor was there apparently any logical procedure to identify what worked and build upon a known lexicon. That is exactly why we have a menu-driven quest system now.

[Nivm]

 How sad. I thought they were simple statements, but I guess people aren't extraordinarily better at parsers than I am. I've never managed to get one to work, so I can't help when I read it.
 Do you know how high a priority enabling all the NPCs chat parsing is?

@ Rigwyn: I guess I goaded a sharp response with that quote'n'jibe, but what I inferred from these places (especially that part about treating them like players) made it sound as though one was supposed to use the chat system almost exclusively for NPCs. I was very annoyed when I thought I was unable to figure out the right phrases.
 My speed should improve significantly now that I know the conversation is broken.

[verden]

Do you know how high a priority enabling all the NPCs chat parsing is?

No one has ever programmed a plain text parser that works very well. After 30 years, there is very little available that is better than the old Infocomm engine. People also do not take to them well, as you have to know how to spell. So, to answer your question: Not very much of a priority at all. That is why we have a menu-driven quest system now. Conversation is not broken however, I generally just talk to the NPCs myself.

[weltall]

even restoring all the text which was removed to let a menu bug don't give trouble won't bring you a full fledged whatever i say text parser. it's computers even neural networks can't do much else than spit some nonsense after all. if they are well taught upon maybe they can work as database but nothing more.
anyway the source is there if you have a better way to implement it show us

[Nivm]

 I'm still trying to get to the source, apparently the guide is flawed, and with partially outdated links.

I've never managed to get one [parser] to work, so I can't help when I read it [the source code].

Oddly enough, I was certain that extremely good parsers were around today; the kinds that are made for the Turing Test and can dismantle complex sentences.

[weltall]

usually msvc is used for windows and gcc for linux/macosx so no one knows how to update the mingw guide.
Parser are still the most complex things to write even something as basic as a plain text config file parser or a compiler parser. both of which don't work with incorrect or evolving syntax and grammar rules that real language has, letting alone logic meaning (a word can have various meaning, a printf can have only one meaning). (just look at English it has at least 4 or 5 main variants, this excluding detection of wrong rule usage which is standard)

[Rigwyn]

I'm still trying to get to the source, apparently the guide is flawed, and with partially outdated links.

I've never managed to get one [parser] to work, so I can't help when I read it [the source code].

Oddly enough, I was certain that extremely good parsers were around today; the kinds that are made for the Turing Test and can dismantle complex sentences.

Do you even know C/C++ Nivm ?

From your posts you don't sound very technical. Either you deliberately tried to trip up the npc with phrases that were not as simple as they could be so that you would have something to jabber about on the forum, or else you don't really have any insight into how a program would parse a line of text. It should be obvious that you should use a simplified sentence with as few words as possible.

Forgive me if I have my head way up my ass, but you don't sound like a programmer to me.

[verden]

Oddly enough, I was certain that extremely good parsers were around today; the kinds that are made for the Turing Test and can dismantle complex sentences.

Even if you see a project that *claims* these sorts of things, it only counts if the parser works. None of them do. Processing of natural language ideas and sentences is an immensely complex undertaking. Another one of those things that seems like it would be simple to most people, but then it becomes very complex during implementation. The Infocomm engine still rules (lol).

Forgive me if I have my head way up my ass, but you don't sound like a programmer to me.

In the software business *everyone* is an *idea person*.

[Nivm]

 Just assume that I know nothing at all about C++ or any other programming language, since I'm not going to show anyone the evidence of such. The best I was able to do was a two-word parser; a verb and a noun. And keeping a list of synonyms that the user could define.
 I expected that most of my sentences would be simplified by a system of synonyms. For instance;

Lady Abelia sent me.
Abelia sent me.
ABelia Aruine sent me.
Miss Abelia sent me. (Success.)

I expected that it would take any number of synonyms for Abelia's name, and it did not. Or;

Can I start the tutorial?
I'd like to start the tutorial, please.
May I start the tutorial?
Could I please begin the tutorial?
May I begin the tutorial?
Can I begin the tutorial?
Could I please start the tutorial?

I expected each of these to be simplified to "[querySelf] [verb] [noun]." I was searching for which synonyms it would have stored. I was also checking whether it really did require a "please" in a specific place.
 However, as I went on, I really did start to just mess with it for my own entertainment. I was hoping they were programmed to respond to my insults.

[steuben]

nivm can i ask a rather silly question.. what did the npc say to you prior to you trying to talk to it?

[Nivm]

 (Not silly, but) I answer your question with a question; how do I access the logs when they aren't in the folder spoken of in the in-game help? I assume it's the same thing everyone has to listen to in the tutorial, all in order of the conversations I had.

 Anyway, I lost the document when my computer crashed (it's that computer, not the game, always has been) but I recorded a few more oddities:
  When you return Neave's book, it start a conversation during which she asks a question, then another. I answer both, and discovered that she was speaking two different dialogs at the same time, repeating points and asking more questions. It was very confusing.
  The pick Neave gives you appears in your inventory far before when the dialog actually says she gives it.
  After accepting the fighting teacher's quest (I don't recall his name), he doesn't prompt you to say you're ready or anything. I waited about 7 seconds, then checked for lag or a disconnect.
 Now to add them to the bugtracker.