§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 we want to make an object that (unlike a backdrop) is definitely located in one room, but can be seen from far off. We want to allow the player to interact with it from a distance, but only using those actions that require visibility. Other actions should be denied:
As the descriptions make clear, the ferris wheel should be visible from everywhere in the fair, so we'll borrow a line from the Activities chapter to make that happen:
"Scope" determines what the player can interact with; by writing this rule, we make Inform understand all commands that refer to the ferris wheel when the player is anywhere in the fairground, instead of responding with
as it normally would. Now, by default, if the player were to type TOUCH FERRIS WHEEL while in another room, he would get the response
This may not be quite what we want, but we can replace this text with our own reaching inside rule:
And because our accessibility rules are considered before the "Instead" phase, we can write the following rule confident that it will apply only when the player is in fact in range to touch the ferris wheel:
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Suppose we want to make an object that (unlike a backdrop) is definitely located in one room, but can be seen from far off. We want to allow the player to interact with it from a distance, but only using those actions that require visibility. Other actions should be denied:
As the descriptions make clear, the ferris wheel should be visible from everywhere in the fair, so we'll borrow a line from the Activities chapter to make that happen:
"Scope" determines what the player can interact with; by writing this rule, we make Inform understand all commands that refer to the ferris wheel when the player is anywhere in the fairground, instead of responding with
as it normally would. Now, by default, if the player were to type TOUCH FERRIS WHEEL while in another room, he would get the response
This may not be quite what we want, but we can replace this text with our own reaching inside rule:
And because our accessibility rules are considered before the "Instead" phase, we can write the following rule confident that it will apply only when the player is in fact in range to touch the ferris wheel:
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