3.8. Sounds

| Chapter 3: Place |

| 3.8. Sounds

It is too easily assumed that room descriptions are what the player sees, but as The Undertomb demonstrates, they might just as easily include ambient sounds.

So Inform's "listening to" action is the audio equivalent of "examining", rather than "looking". Despite this the player can type LISTEN, which Inform understands as listening to the everything in the location at once. A simple but effective way to handle this is shown in The Art of Noise.

Four Stars 2 adjusts the idea of "visibility" to make it behave differently for listening purposes: this introduces a formal idea of "audibility".

See Lighting for heightened hearing in darkness, and the rest of "Four Stars"

48
| Example The Undertomb 1 A small map of dead ends, in which the sound of an underground river has different strengths in different caves. |
WI

This example creates a kind of room, "dead end", and gives each a textual description called its "river sound". Note the use of a text substitution to fill in the appropriate river sound text in each dead end. "The Undertomb" A dead end is a kind of room with printed name "Dead End" and description "This is a dead end. You'll have to go back the way you came, consoled only by [river sound]." A dead end is usually dark. The Undertomb is a dark room. East is a dead end. South is a dead end with printed name "Collapsed Dead End". Northwest is a dead end called the Tortuous Alcove. In the Undertomb is the lantern. It is lit. A dead end has some text called river sound. The river sound of a dead end is usually "a faint whispering of running water". The Tortuous Alcove has river sound "a gurgle of running water". Test me with "get lantern / e / w / s / n / nw / se".

95
| Example The Art of Noise Things are all assigned their own noise (or silence). Listening to the room in general reports on all the things that are currently audible. |
WI

349
| Example Scope for listening different from scope for seeing Using "deciding the scope" to change the content of lists such as "the list of audible things which can be touched by the player". |
WI

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