Ahem... but there were many cultures during \"medieval\" times that were making candies in lots of different forms:

American Indians: Fish smoked and glazed in honey

Incans/Aztecs/Mayans: Chocolate candies of all kinds

Hawaians: Sugarcane mixed with different fruits ad then dried, fruits with honey and nuts.

Britains: Candied yams, Candied etc. Honeyed things (such as mead), Sweet cream candies, Taffy\'s, etc.

Chinese: Rice candies, sesame candies, etc.

Japanese: Rice candies

Those are just off the top of my head. I\'m sure that others can come up with more examples.

For those of you that do remember Zork, you should remember that it had a system that parsed the input line into a sequence of tokens that were then matched to an expected set of commands.  for instance: \"go to the west\" would equate to the same thing as \"go west\", \"pick up the damn screwdriver\" would be the same as \"get the screwdriver\" and \"get screwdriver\"

IIRC how it worked was that it first removed all unnecessary verbiage such as \"the\" and \"it\" and broke it down to mostly verbs and nouns. It then converted synonyms to a single word to make it easier to find the action to take. for instance \"toss\", \"chuck\", \"hurl\", and \"fling\" all were converted to \"throw\". By using something similar to this you can get quite good results.

One example of how a parser might work for a game can be read at the following website http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/commpars.htm

If you took the suggestion from that page to create an object-oriented parser for an input line that would be quite interesting.

If you further added some kind of soundex breakdown of the parsed line you could catch some of the common misspellings that people make and increase the accuracy of the server to recognie what people are saying. If you don\'t know what soundex is then check out http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/numbers/soundex.html for a good description of it\'s uses.  I would expect the soundex to only be used as a last resort if it wasn\'t caught by normal matching.

For the point-n-click crowd, it would be easy enough to populate a list of automatic reponses to a specific NPC and cache it on the client\'s end for those that choose to have a point-n-click experience.  The role-players could turn off the point-n-click functionality whenever they want to (or Turn it on if it defaults to being off).


No matter which way Planeshift goes I think that it will be pretty cool

p.s. I do hope that the developers put into place some kind of logging of discussions with NPCs so that they can fine tune the conversations as well as the soundex method to catch common misspellings and sound-alike words.  That would be truly amazing to see!

I think unique names are required otherwise the \"/tell\" command would not work.