3.2. Rooms and the map

| Chapter 3: Things |

| 3.2. Rooms and the map

Rooms are joined together at their edges by "map connections", most of which are pathways in one of the eight cardinal compass directions: north, northeast (written without a hyphen), east, southeast, south, southwest, west, northwest. We also have up and down, suitable for staircases or ladders. In real life, people are seldom conscious of their compass bearing when walking around buildings, but it makes a concise and unconfusing way for the player to say where to go next, so is generally accepted as a convention of the genre.

Two more directions are provided by Inform: "inside" and "outside". These are best used when one location is, say, a meadow and the other is a woodcutter's hut in the middle of it; we might then say

> Inside from the Meadow is the woodcutter's hut.

The "from" is important, as it clarifies that we intend to link two different locations, not to create an item - the hut - in a single location - the meadow.

A problem which sometimes arises when laying out maps is that Inform allows short forms of room names to be used as abbreviations. This is usually a good idea, but has unfortunate results if we write:

> The Airport Road is west of the Fish Packing Plant. The Airport is west of the Airport Road.

...because "Airport" is taken as a reference to "Airport Road", so Inform makes only two locations, one of which supernaturally leads to itself. We can avoid this by writing:

> The Airport Road is west of the Fish Packing Plant. A room called the Airport is west of the Airport Road.

Using "called" is often a good way to specify something whose name might give rise to confusion otherwise. It always makes something new, and it is also neatly concise, because we can establish something's kind and name in the same sentence. As another example, suppose we want to create a room called "South of the Hut", to south of the Hut. We can't do so like this:

> South of the Hut is a room. South of the Hut is south of the Hut.

...because Inform will read that first sentence as placing a (nameless) room to the south of a room called "Hut". Once again "called" can save the day:

> South of the Hut is a room called South of the Hut.

It is best to use "called" in the simplest way possible, and in particular, best not to use "called" twice in the same sentence. Consider:

> The kitchen cabinet contains a container called a mixing bowl and a portable supporter called a platter.

It is unlikely that anyone would want to name something "a mixing bowl and a portable supporter called a platter", but not impossible, and Inform tends not to be a good judge of what is likely.

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| Example Port Royal 1 A partial implementation of Port Royal, Jamaica, set before the earthquake of 1692 demolished large portions of the city. |
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| Example Up and Up Adding a short message as the player approaches a room, before the room description itself appears. |
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| Example Starry Void Creating a booth that can be seen from the outside, opened and closed, and entered as a separate room. |
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Sometimes we may want a room to be visible from the outside in one location, but treated as a separate location when we are inside. The simplest way to do this is to make the exterior form of the object into a door object, and to describe it differently from different vantage points. (Doors in general are described more fully in the Doors section of the Things chapter.) "Starry Void" The Center Ring is a room. The magician's booth is a door. "[if the player is in Center Ring]A magician's booth stands in the corner, painted dark blue with glittering gold stars.[otherwise if the magician's booth is closed]A crack of light indicates the way back out to the center ring.[otherwise]The door stands open to the outside.[end if]". Here we've arranged for the booth to be described in the initial room description in different ways depending on where the player is when viewing it. We might like to do the same if the player takes a closer look: Instead of examining the magician's booth in the Center Ring: say "It is dark blue and glittering with gold stars. [if the booth is open]The door currently stands open[otherwise]It has been firmly shut[end if]." Instead of examining the magician's booth in the Starry Void: say "The booth door is [if the magician's booth is open]wide open[otherwise]shut, admitting only a thin crack of light[end if]." And now we put it in place: The magician's booth is inside from Center Ring and outside from Starry Void. ...and make sure that the booth-and-door object responds to all the names we have used for it in different places: Understand "door" or "of" or "the" or "light" or "crack" or "thin crack" as the booth. Test me with "examine booth / open door of the booth / in / examine door / close door / look / examine crack of light". A final nice touch, if we're so inclined, is to borrow from the Basic Actions chapter and make the player automatically open the booth door before trying to enter: Before going through the closed magician's booth: say "(first opening the door of the booth)[command clarification break]"; silently try opening the booth. For the contrasting case of a space that is nested inside another place and is not its own room -- say a stall at an open-air market, or a rowboat on a lake -- see the example "Tamed".

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