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

212
| Example Carnivale An alternative to backdrops when we want something to be visible from a distance but only touchable from one room. |
WI

213
| Example Eddystone Creating new commands involving the standard compass directions. |
WI

Using the compass directions in commands is a little bit finicky because directions are forbidden to figure in any interactions involving touch. (Really, directions are more a concept than an object; this is a compromise situation.) In any case, if we want to write a new command involving these, we need to be sure to specify that the direction is a visible thing. For instance: "Eddystone" The Lighthouse is a room. "A lonely place, but in these tense times, no one but the lighthouse keeper and a few trusted agents are allowed on the grounds at all, for fear of sabotage." The light is a fixed in place thing in the Lighthouse. "At the center of the room is the light itself, a 1000-Watt tungsten halogen light powered by diesel generator, and having a visible range of twenty-six nautical miles." Understand "lamp" as the light. It is lit. The light has a a direction called heading. The heading of the light is north. A room is usually dark. Understand "turn [something] [a direction]" as reorienting it to. Reorienting it to is an action applying to two things. will give us >turn light northeast You must name something more substantial. To avoid this mystifying result: "Eddystone" The Lighthouse is a room. "A lonely place, but in these tense times, no one but the lighthouse keeper and a few trusted agents are allowed on the grounds at all, for fear of sabotage." The light is a fixed in place thing in the Lighthouse. "At the center of the room is the light itself, a 1000-Watt tungsten halogen light powered by diesel generator, and having a visible range of twenty-six nautical miles." Understand "lamp" as the light. It is lit. The light has a direction called heading. The heading of the light is north. A room is usually dark. Understand "turn [something] [a direction]" as reorienting it to. Reorienting it to is an action applying to one thing and one visible thing. Instead of turning the light, say "Try turning the light to the direction of your choice." Check reorienting it to: if the noun is not the light, say "You couldn't do so meaningfully." instead; if the second noun is up or the second noun is down, say "The light only points in compass directions." instead. And now that's done, we have a little fun calculating where the beam hits: Carry out reorienting it to: now the heading of the light is the second noun; let way be the heading of the light; let place be the room way from the Lighthouse; while place is a room and place is lower than Lighthouse: let place be the room way from the place; if place is not a room, remove the beam from play; otherwise move beam to the place. Report reorienting it to: say "The light now points [heading of the light][if the beam is in a room], spotlighting [the holder of the beam][otherwise], into empty space[end if]." The beam is a lit thing. Understand "light" or "brilliant" as the beam. "Brilliant light from the lighthouse floods the whole area." It is fixed in place. Instead of doing something other than examining to the beam: say "The light is, of course, intangible." The description is "The light is coming from the lighthouse, since the lamp is apparently pointed this way." Altitude is a kind of value. 200 ft specifies an altitude. A room has an altitude. The altitude of a room is usually 50 ft. The altitude of the Lighthouse is 100 ft. Definition: a room is low if its altitude is 20 ft or less. The Jetty is south of the Lighthouse. "During daylight hours, a fine place to catch almost unlimited supplies of crayfish. Less entertaining by night." North of the Lighthouse is the Uphill Road. The altitude of Uphill Road is 75 ft. North of Uphill Road is Hilltop. The altitude of Hilltop is 110 ft. The description of Hilltop is "The highest natural point around for miles; sometimes you will sit up here and watch for the lighthouse supply ship, the Lady Loch." Northeast of the Lighthouse is Open Field. East of the Lighthouse is Stanley Creek Valley. The description of Stanley Creek is "This place used to have some other name meaning Ghost Valley in the aboriginal language, but it was piously renamed by missionaries." Train Trestle is east of the Stanley Creek Valley. "The now-abandoned track of the Bush Pacific Railway runs here, above Stanley Creek." The altitude of Train Trestle is 100 ft. Before going from a room (called source) to a room (called destination): if source is lower than destination: say "It's an uphill climb..."; otherwise: if destination is lower than source, say "You're heading downhill now..."; otherwise say "It's a straight shot." Test me with "turn lamp / turn lamp down / turn lamp east / e / e". All very loosely based on the Eddystone Point lighthouse of Tasmania, built in 1889, and forbiddingly remote even today. George Isaacs, a child growing up in the lighthouse, remembers the plentiful crayfish.

215
| Example Waterworld A backdrop which the player can examine, but cannot interact with in any other way. |
WI

80
| Example A View of Green Hills A LOOK [direction] command which allows the player to see descriptions of the nearby landscape. |
WI

62
| Example Tiny Garden A lawn made up of several rooms, with part of the description written automatically. |
WI

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. |
WI

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. |
WI

79
| 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. |
WI

Previous | Contents | Next