Text parser autosuggest

The text parser in Cascade Quest is similar to those in the old Sierra games, and decomposes a user’s input into a grammatical tree which is then matched against clauses in the game’s scripts.

This won’t be a post on how the text parser works, but instead on how the autosuggest is implemented. Typing in all your commands can be tedious, but autosuggest makes it a lot simpler.

 

The basics

The game has a list of words it understands (about 1400 currently). They are tagged with their grammar class (verb, noun, etc…). As the player is typing, we do a prefix match against words in the database. The player can tab to autocomplete the current suggestion, or arrow to desired suggestion. Or they can just use the suggestions to ensure their spelling is correct.

To help avoid poor suggestions, we apply a ranking system to all matching results. Here are some of the heuristics:

• When suggesting completions for the first word in a sentence, we prefer verbs over nouns (a more complex system could analyze the grammar tree, but I don’t do that).
• Words that are in any currently loaded scripts are ranked higher.
• Words that are specifically used in the current room’s script are ranked even higher.
• There is a set of commonly-used preferred words that get a ranking boost. These include common verbs like ‘look’, ‘get’, and so on.
• The most recently-used words get a boost (this does introduce some unpredictability in the results, however).

At some point, I’ll probably have to implement a banned list too. The game understands some “naughty” and/or trademarked terms (or in some cases special tokens that aren’t words) that I don’t want to display in an autosuggest.

Another possibility might be to implement automatic spell-checking (i.e. correcting mistyped words after the fact). These are things that will be narrowed down once more thorough play-testing is done.

Does it spoil the spirit of the game?

When I first implemented this, I was worried about autosuggest giving away secrets in the game. I soon realized, however, that this isn’t a big problem.

Will it give away spoilers to some of the puzzles? When the puzzles are properly-designed, I have yet to see an instance where this is the case. If the autosuggest were spoiling things, that tends to mean you’ve got a “guess the word” puzzle. This is what I’m specifically trying to avoid. The possible interactions and objects around you should hopefully be obvious.

There are some cases when an object on-screen is hidden, and only revealed (and described) when you interact with another object. In that case, yes, the auto-suggest could give some clues. However, with a vocabulary of over 1400 words, it’s going to be difficult to gain much insight from the autosuggest results.

Possible improvements

Currently, the autosuggest is sourced from the compiled resources. These make no distinction between synonyms of words. For instance, all these words are treated equally: acquire, capture, catch, gather, get, grab, obtain, pick, take, want. A number of these are rarely used and can clutter autosuggest results. In this particular case, ‘get’ and ‘take’ belong to our list of preferred words, so they would get boosted.

 

 

A better example is perhaps the following synonyms: cliff, hill, knoll, mountain, volcano. In a room with a volcano, the script source code will reference the term ‘volcano’. This is the term I want promoted mostly heavily. However, all these terms are synonymous from the interpreter’s point of view. I simply need the resource compiler to output more information regarding which words are used in source code. Playtesting will determine how much of a problem this clutter ends up actually being.