Chapter 3: Things
3.1. Descriptions

At its simplest, the interactive fiction will be simulating a physical world to explore. The forerunner of today's IF is generally agreed to be a computer simulation by Will Crowther of the exploration of a cave system in the Mammoth and Flint Ridge chain of caves in Kentucky, a part of which might be described in Inform thus:

"Cave Entrance"

The Cobble Crawl is a room. "You are crawling over cobbles in a low passage. There is a dim light at the east end of the passage."

A wicker cage is here. "There is a small wicker cage discarded nearby."

The Debris Room is west of the Crawl. "You are in a debris room filled with stuff washed in from the surface. A low wide passage with cobbles becomes plugged with mud and debris here, but an awkward canyon leads upward and west. A note on the wall says, 'Magic word XYZZY'."

The black rod is here. "A three foot black rod with a rusty star on one end lies nearby."

Above the Debris Room is the Sloping E/W Canyon. West of the Canyon is the Orange River Chamber.

Here we sketch in four of Crowther's locations, and two objects: just enough to be able to walk around the caves and pick up the rod and the cage. The text in quotation marks will appear verbatim as paragraphs shown to the player as the caves are explored. The first paragraph, as we have seen, is the title of the work. The other quotations describe the places and objects introduced.

If we play this game, we find that we can type TAKE CAGE or TAKE WICKER CAGE, for instance, but not TAKE SMALL CAGE. Inform saw that we called this "a wicker cage" when it first appeared in the source text, and assumed that the player would call it that, too. (Whereas it didn't look inside the descriptive text to allow for TAKE SMALL CAGE or TAKE DISCARDED CAGE or TAKE NEARBY CAGE.) A small limitation here is that probably only the first 9 letters of each word are read from the player's command. This is plenty for handling the wicker cage and the black rod, but it might be embarrassing at a meeting of the Justice League to find that KISS SUPERHERO and KISS SUPERHEROINE read as if they are the same command.

So we have already found that Inform has made some assumptions about what we want, and imposed some limitations on how much computational effort to go to when the work of IF is finally played. If Inform guesses what we need wrongly, we need to know more advanced features of the language in order to overcome these problems. (We shall see how to change the way the player's commands are read in the chapter on Understanding.) This is often how Inform works: make the standard way of doing things as simple as possible to describe, but allow almost any behaviour to be altered by more elaborate source text.


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* Example  Verbosity 1
Making rooms give full descriptions each time we enter, even if we have visited before.

RB
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** Example  Slightly Wrong
A room whose description changes slightly after our first visit there.

RB

A fairly common effect in interactive fiction is a room which is described differently on the first visit than on subsequent visits. We can produce this effect as follows:

"Slightly Wrong"

Awning is a room. "A tan awning is stretched on tent poles over the dig-site, providing a little shade to the workers here; you are at the bottom of a square twenty feet on a side, marked out with pegs and lines of string. Uncovered in the south face of this square is an awkward opening into the earth."

Slightly Wrong Chamber is south of the Awning. "[if unvisited]When you first step into the room, you are bothered by the sense that something is not quite right: perhaps the lighting, perhaps the angle of the walls. [end if]A mural on the far wall depicts a woman with a staff, tipped with a pine-cone. She appears to be watching you."

Test me with "look / s / look".

Note the "[if unvisited]..." in the description of the Slightly Wrong Chamber. A room is considered to be "unvisited" until after the player has seen its description for the first time.

The bracketed text creates a special rule for printing; we will learn more about these in the sections on text with variations and text with substitutions.

Some further fine print: we might write our condition as "if unvisited", "if the location is unvisited", or "if the Chamber is unvisited" -- all of these constructions would be acceptable, but in the absence of more specifics, the condition is understood to apply to the object whose description it is.


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