§3.4. Continuous Spaces and The Outdoors
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
![]() | Start of Chapter 3: Place |
![]() | Back to §3.3. Position Within Rooms |
![]() | Onward to §3.5. Doors, Staircases, and Bridges |
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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.
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...
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:
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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.
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...
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:
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