It would be nice (although less hilarious) if it was smart enough to know how to use the words "my" and "your":

Alice pointed the revolver at Bob. 'Tell me where you have hidden the golden falcon, Bob, or I shall shoot you,' she said. 'Please don't shoot!', Bob cried, 'it is in Alice's bed'.

Alice pointed the revolver at Bob. 'Tell me where you have hidden the golden falcon, Bob, or I shall shoot you,' she said. 'Please don't shoot!', Bob cried, 'it is in his bed'.

Currently, when an Animate talks to an Animate, the receiving Animate's "topic" is set (and the next time they take a turn, they respond to that topic.)

When there are only two characters, this is not a huge problem.

But if there are three characters, and two characters talk to the third, the third will only remember (and respond to) the last one who talked to them.

Otoh, remembering and responding to everything every other character said to you isn't realistic either and could, I imagine, easily balloon out of control. The "best" solution would be to prioritize it somehow, based on what's most attention-holding to that character. (and I think we can assume that being held at gunpoint is fairly highly attention-grabbing, yes.)

This should be replaced by "Bob was in the kitchen. Bob wandered around for a bit, then went back to the kitchen."

This should be done, probably, by recording both start and end locations on events that involve travelling from one location to another. Then have an Editor pass that looks for events where start location == end location, and rephrasing them.

Depends on #5.

The sample files could use examples of adding locations and objects to extend the default world.

That is to say -- you can't set conditions for a specific character to speak a certain way.

I don't mean "in French" (per se), but to use different words or phrases.

All dialogue seems to be handled by... different parts of the Character class

• move_to
• live
• converse
• discuss
• decide_what_to_do_about
• converse

... and are not externally exposed (are they?), so they can't be modified/extended without modifying core code.

At any rate -- these notes are for making your engine more generic for my potential purposes and not making it more useful for your definite purposes. So it goes.

Driver scripts (in script/ and eg/) can pass various options to the Publisher, and you can edit the script to pass different options, but it would be really nice to be able to just pass command-line options to the script (like: script/the_swallows.py --debug --chapters=1000) and have it pass those on to the Publisher.

Events should have both "private" and "public" aspects, although either aspect could be optional. When they appear in a paragraph, if it is written from the event-initiator's point of view, use the private aspect. Otherwise, use the public one.

Examples:

• "It was so nice being in the kitchen again!" is private; the public aspect might be "Alice was clearly overjoyed to be in the kitchen again."
• "Alice thought she heard something." is private; the public aspect might be "Alice moved her head suddenly, as if she had heard something in the distance."
• "Bob saw Alice." is private; the public aspect might be "Bob looked at Alice."

Or again, just to emphasize, there might not be a public aspect for an event, in which case it should not appear if the paragraph is written from some other actor's point of view.

The first version of the Editor did look a lot like a peephole optimizer, but modern compilers are often written in a "broad" fashion, where (with the benefit of lots of resources like memory) they make multiple passes over the code, with each pass focusing on one particular transformation. The Editor could really use the same approach, since efficiency is not really an issue, and the current code is really pretty confusing, as it tries to make several transformations in a single pass.

...so that you can generate the same story over and over again. Mainly for debugging. Debug output should include the random seed that was used. In conjunction with #7, using this might look something like: script/the_swallows.py --seed=71521.

Sometimes, running unmodified (or modified) the swallows++.py an error will be thrown having to do with a Horror object.

These error are intermittent.
I ran the output 11 times successfully before encountering this error:

D:\Dropbox\projects\The-Swallows\eg>"the_swallows++.py" > output.txt
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "D:\Dropbox\projects\The-Swallows\eg\the_swallows++.py", line 45, in <module>
    publisher.publish()
  File "D:\Dropbox\projects\The-Swallows\eg\..\src\swallows\engine\events.py", line 212, in publish
    actor.live()
  File "D:\Dropbox\projects\The-Swallows\eg\..\src\swallows\story\characters.py", line 153, in live
    return self.converse(self.topic)
  File "D:\Dropbox\projects\The-Swallows\eg\..\src\swallows\story\characters.py", line 302, in conve
rse
    decision = self.what_to_do_about[topic.subject]
KeyError: <swallows.engine.objects.Horror object at 0x000000000231B240>

I was not able to get the error to occur when running with debug=True although maybe I could have run it more times; I ran it about 30 times and gave up; after commenting debug back out... I got the error in about 8 runs.