3.4. Continuous Spaces and The Outdoors

| Chapter 3: Place |

| 3.4. Continuous Spaces and The Outdoors

Inform's division of geography into "rooms" is a good compromise for most purposes. The rooms are cut off from each other by (imaginary or actual) walls, while all of the interior of a given room is regarded as the same place.

Suppose we want to blur the boundaries between rooms, in an environment where there are no walls: out of doors, for instance?

The simplest cases involve making something exceptional visible in more than one place. Carnivale features an exceptionally large landmark seen by day; Eddystone an exceptionally bright one by night. Waterworld allows a very distant object (the Sun) to be seen throughout many rooms, but never approached. View of Green Hills gives the player an explicit command for looking through into an adjacent room.

Three systematic examples then present outdoor landscapes with increasing sophistication. Tiny Garden gives the multiple rooms of an extended lawn descriptions which automatically adapt to say which directions lead into further lawn area. Rock Garden provides a relation, "connected with", between rooms, allowing items in one to be seen from the other: an attempt to interact with a visible item in a different area of the garden triggers an implicit going action first. Stately Gardens provides a much larger outdoor area, where larger landmarks are visible from further away, and room descriptions are highly adaptive.

In an outdoor environment, the distinction between a one-move journey and a multiple-move journey is also blurred. Hotel Stechelberg shows a signpost which treats these equally.

See Position Within Rooms for making the space within a room continuous

See Windows for another way to see between locations

See Doors, Staircases, and Bridges for still a third way to be told at least what lies adjacent

See Passers-By, Weather and Astronomical Events for more on describing the sky

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| Example Carnivale An alternative to backdrops when we want something to be visible from a distance but only touchable from one room. |
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213
| Example Eddystone Creating new commands involving the standard compass directions. |
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215
| Example Waterworld A backdrop which the player can examine, but cannot interact with in any other way. |
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80
| Example A View of Green Hills A LOOK [direction] command which allows the player to see descriptions of the nearby landscape. |
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Suppose a game in which the player is wandering an open landscape with long vistas, allowing him to LOOK in some direction, or even look at an adjacent location. "A View of Green Hills" Corinth is a room. Athens is east of Corinth. Epidaurus is southeast of Corinth and east of Mycenae. Mycenae is south of Corinth. Olympia is west of Mycenae. Argos is south of Mycenae. Thebes is northwest of Athens. Pylos is south of Olympia. Sparta is east of Pylos and south of Argos. Delphi is northwest of Thebes. Understand "look [direction]" as facing. Facing is an action applying to one visible thing. Carry out facing: let the viewed item be the room noun from the location; if the viewed item is not a room, say "You can't see anything promising that way." instead; try looking toward the viewed item. In rules about action handling, "noun" refers to the first object that the player has mentioned in his command, so if the player typed >LOOK WEST, "let the viewed item be the room noun from the location" would be processed as "let the viewed item be the room west from the location", and so on. We can at need override the default behavior, if it is not going to be appropriate for the player to see the next room over. There is only sky above at any time, so... Instead of facing up: say "Above you is bright sky." Understand "look toward [any adjacent room]" as looking toward. Understand "examine [any adjacent room]" as looking toward. Looking toward is an action applying to one visible thing. Carry out looking toward: say "You make out [the noun] that way." This design allows us to create descriptions for rooms (as seen from the outside) which will work regardless of where we're looking from. For instance: Instead of looking toward Athens: say "Even from here you can make out the silhouette of the Acropolis." Test me with "look north / look south / look up / look east / east / look west".

62
| Example Tiny Garden A lawn made up of several rooms, with part of the description written automatically. |
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352
| Example Rock Garden A simple open landscape where the player can see between rooms and will automatically move to touch things in distant rooms. |
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353
| Example Stately Gardens An open landscape where the player can see landmarks in nearby areas, with somewhat more complex room descriptions than the previous example, and in which we also account for size differences between things seen at a distance. |
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| Example Hotel Stechelberg Signposts such as those provided on hiking paths in the Swiss Alps, which show the correct direction and hiking time to all other locations. |
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