9.3. Clothing

| Chapter 9: Props: Food, Clothing, Money, Toys, Books, Electronics |

| 9.3. Clothing

A person can wear any (portable) thing which has the "wearable" property. (This property seldom needs to be quoted because it is deduced automatically from sentences like "Trevor wears a red hat.")

In most traditional IF, clothing is only used when it is exceptional in some way. That is, we ignore the three to eight different garments most people are wearing at any given time - the everyday clothes which people wear without thinking about them - and only simulate the unexpected extras: a borrowed jaunty red hat, a radiation-proof space suit, and so on.

These unusual garments turn up only occasionally in play and usually one at a time, so Inform does not normally provide rules to restrict how much or little is worn, or in what unlikely combinations. Get Me to the Church on Time categorises clothing by body area (trousers for lower body, shirts for upper); Bogart by layer, distinguishing underwear from outer garments. What Not To Wear combines both into a general-purpose system adequate for most kinds of clothing situations.

See Kitchen and Bathroom for a simple mirror implementation, which could be adapted to reflect what the player is currently wearing

Hayes Code is a somewhat stripped down version.

Clothes are normally single things which have no function other than display and concealment, but Being Prepared gives them pockets which act as containers, and Some Assembly Required allows clothes to be stitched together from pieces of cloth.

44
| Example Get Me to the Church on Time Using kinds of clothing to prevent the player from wearing several pairs of trousers at the same time. |
WI

234
| Example Bogart Clothing for the player that layers, so that items cannot be taken off in the wrong order, and the player's inventory lists only the clothing that is currently visible. |
WI

241
| Example What Not To Wear A general-purpose clothing system that handles a variety of different clothing items layered in different combinations over different areas of the body. |
WI

325
| Example Hays Code Clark Gable in a pin-striped suit and a pink thong. |
WI

54
| Example Being Prepared A kind for jackets, which always includes a container called a pocket. |
WI

319
| Example Some Assembly Required Building different styles of shirt from component sleeves and collars. |
WI

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