§8.4. Furniture
Most domestic furniture consists of supporters and containers of one size or another. This means that the simplest furniture needs no elaborate instructions:
The candlestick is on the dining table. The dining table is fixed in place.
The silver salt cellar is on the serving trolley. The serving trolley is pushable between rooms.
The pillow is on the bed. The bed is enterable and fixed in place.
The examples below are therefore mostly ways to get around the usual restrictions on containers (that they only have one interior) and supporters (that they cannot simultaneously be containers as well).
Yolk of Gold provides a set of drawers, that is, a container with multiple interiors.
U-Stor-It provides a way to have containers with a lid which is also a supporter.
Swigmore provides a supporter which holds up the player, but has no top surface as such, and cannot hold up anything else. Kiwi demonstrates a kind of high shelf, whose objects cannot be seen or used unless the player stands on a ladder.
Princess and the Pea shows how a pile of supporters, each on top of the last, could be managed.
Tamed demonstrates furniture large enough to get inside, or on top of.
Circle of Misery demonstrates a conveyor belt, which can hold multiple items but only brings one of them within the player's reach at a time.
See Position Within Rooms for a box that can be positioned and used as a stepping stool
See The Human Body for letting the player take different postures on furniture or on the floor
See Room Descriptions for tables and other furniture whose content listing is suppressed or modified in a room description
See Entering and Exiting, Sitting and Standing for making the player automatically rise from a seat before leaving the room
See Clocks and Scientific Instruments for a grandfather clock
See Kitchen and Bathroom for a mirror the player can look into
![]() | Start of Chapter 8: Vehicles, Animals and Furniture |
![]() | Back to §8.3. Animals |
![]() | Onward to §8.5. Kitchen and Bathroom |
|
|
|
|
|
Inform's default assumption is that if a player on an enterable object drops something, the dropped article winds up beside him on the same supporter or in the same container. This makes lots of sense for a dais, say, or a king-sized bed. It's a little less sensible if the enterable supporter in question is a bar stool or the like. So suppose we want to add a new kind of supporter called a perch, where everything dropped lands on the floor. There are actually several ways of implementing this, but one of them is to reach right into the drop action and replace the "standard dropping rule" with a different one of our own invention -- like this:
Now the carry-out behavior of the dropping action has been changed, but we haven't had to interfere in the checks or reporting at all. The rest of the action works just as it always did. Of course, maybe we do want to change the way the action is reported, to make it clearer to the player where the dropped article wound up:
|
|
Inform's default assumption is that if a player on an enterable object drops something, the dropped article winds up beside him on the same supporter or in the same container. This makes lots of sense for a dais, say, or a king-sized bed. It's a little less sensible if the enterable supporter in question is a bar stool or the like. So suppose we want to add a new kind of supporter called a perch, where everything dropped lands on the floor. There are actually several ways of implementing this, but one of them is to reach right into the drop action and replace the "standard dropping rule" with a different one of our own invention -- like this:
Now the carry-out behavior of the dropping action has been changed, but we haven't had to interfere in the checks or reporting at all. The rest of the action works just as it always did. Of course, maybe we do want to change the way the action is reported, to make it clearer to the player where the dropped article wound up:
|
|