3.16. Vehicles and pushable things

| Chapter 3: Things |

| 3.16. Vehicles and pushable things

Next in the tour of standard kinds is the "vehicle". This behaves like (indeed, is) an enterable container, except that it will not be portable unless this is specified.

> In the Garage is a vehicle called the red sports car.

The player can enter the sports car and then move around riding inside it, by typing directions exactly as if on foot: and the game will print names of rooms with "(in the red sports car)" appended, lest this be forgotten.

We have already seen that some things are portable, others fixed in place. In fact we can also make a third sort of thing: those which, although not portable, can be pushed from one room to another with commands like "push the wheelbarrow north". At a pinch, we might just be willing to allow:

> The red sports car is pushable between rooms.

But of course this is a property which almost any thing can have, not just a vehicle. (Only "almost" because Inform will not allow a door to be pushable between rooms, in the interests of realism rather than surrealism.)

If we need vehicles which the passenger sits on top of, like a horse or a tractor, the standard "vehicle" kind will not be ideal. However, by loading one of the extensions which comes ready-installed:

> Include Rideable Vehicles by Graham Nelson.

...we are provided with two more kinds, "rideable vehicle" and "rideable animal", just right for the tractor and the horse respectively. (As with all extensions, the documentation can be seen by clicking Go on some source which contains the above line, and then turning to the Contents index.)

See Going by, going through, going with for further ways to customize vehicle behaviour

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| Example Peugeot A journey from one room to another that requires the player to be on a vehicle. |
RB

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| Example Disenchantment Bay 8 Disenchantment Bay: a pushable chest of ice for the boat. |
RB

We probably do not need a vehicle to ride around our boat, but there might be a heavy ice chest that can only be pushed from room to room: The ice chest is a closed openable container in the Deck. "A very heavy ice chest sits on the ground." It is fixed in place and pushable between rooms. A quantity of ice is in the chest. The description is "Ready and waiting just in case there's any fish needing to be kept cool." This anticipates a later chapter, but it would probably be a good idea to hint to the player, if he tries to take the ice chest, that there is another way to move it: Instead of taking the chest: say "It's too heavy to lift, but you might be able to push it, and just inch it over the frame of the door." Otherwise, attempts to pick it up will just reply with "That's fixed in place."

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| Example Hover Letting the player see a modified room description when he's viewing the place from inside a vehicle. |
RB

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