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Invisible scenery

A topic by Garry Francis created Oct 07, 2019 Views: 114 Replies: 4
Viewing posts 1 to 2
Submitted

In Inform 6, there are two attributes called 'static' and 'scenery' that can be applied to objects. A static object is one that can't be moved, but is listed in the room's list of objects. (This is equivalent to Adventuron's scenery.) A scenery object is one that can't be moved and isn't listed in the room's list of objects. (Adventuron doesn't have this.)

I use a lot of nouns in room descriptions that can be examined and (sometimes) manipulated in various ways. For example, if I have a gate, it can be examined to describe it and say whether it's open or closed. It can be opened and closed. And you can't move in the gate's direction unless it's open. The trouble is, if someone tries to get it, Adventuron says, "You look around but can't see any gate anywhere." This means that I have to trap the GET and provide an alternate message to say that it's not portable. This happens so often, that it's getting to be a real pain. Essentially, every noun in every description. So does Adventuron have a way of declaring a scenery object so that it's "invisible" and doesn't get listed in the room's list of objects?

Yep. Just add...

conspicuous="false"

...to the object definition.

(1 edit)

e.g.

   gate    : scenery "the gate" start_at = "crossroads" conspicuous="false";

Submitted

OMG. That is so, so helpful. I can now have adjectives, as well. In the case of my gate example, as it's now an object, I can also move it between rooms so that I don't have to duplicate the code in both rooms.

Yeah, I don't tend to use 'objects' for scenery or NPCs in 8-bit systems like the PAW, preferring to use flags instead, but it's so much easier if you use them in Adventuron. It cuts down on so much manual coding.