Chapter 9: Props: Food, Clothing, Money, Toys, Books, Electronics
§9.1. Food; §9.2. Bags, Bottles, Boxes and Safes; §9.3. Clothing; §9.4. Money; §9.5. Dice and Playing Cards; §9.6. Reading Matter; §9.7. Painting and Labeling Devices; §9.8. Simple Machines; §9.9. Televisions and Radios; §9.10. Telephones; §9.11. Clocks and Scientific Instruments; §9.12. Cameras and Recording Devices
![]() | Contents of The Inform Recipe Book |
![]() | Chapter 8: Vehicles, Animals and Furniture |
![]() | Chapter 10: Physics: Substances, Ropes, Energy and Weight |
![]() | Indexes of the examples |
§9.1. Food
Inform provides an either/or property called "edible" and an action, "eating", for consuming edible things:
The lardy cake is edible. After eating the lardy cake, say "Sticky but delicious."
For eating something not immediately to hand, see Lollipop Guild. Delicious, Delicious Rocks, conversely, adds a sanity check which prevents the player from automatically taking inedible things only to be told they can't be eaten.
Inform does not normally simulate taste or digestion, but to provide foods with a range of flavours, see Would you...?; to make eating different foods affect the player differently, see Stone, or for the extreme case of poisoning foods, Candy. In MRE, hunger causes the player problems unless he regularly finds and eats food.
See Liquids for things to drink
See Dispensers and Supplies of Small Objects for a pizza buffet table from which the player may take all the slices he wants
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In some cases, we may want to add new stages to action processing. One possibility is a stage where we check the sanity of what the player is trying to do before executing any of the other commands; so that we avoid, for instance
Here is how we might insert such a stage in our action processing, using rulebook manipulation.
Notice that now Inform does not try taking the rock before rejecting the player's attempt to eat it. It is of course possible to get the same effect with
...and in a small game with few rules, there's not much reason to add an extra stage. The ability to modify the stages of action processing becomes useful when we have a fairly large game with sophisticated modeling and want to be sure that some kinds of message (such as the sanity-check) are always handled before other things that we might be doing at the before stage (such as generating implicit actions like opening doors before going through them). |
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In some cases, we may want to add new stages to action processing. One possibility is a stage where we check the sanity of what the player is trying to do before executing any of the other commands; so that we avoid, for instance
Here is how we might insert such a stage in our action processing, using rulebook manipulation.
Notice that now Inform does not try taking the rock before rejecting the player's attempt to eat it. It is of course possible to get the same effect with
...and in a small game with few rules, there's not much reason to add an extra stage. The ability to modify the stages of action processing becomes useful when we have a fairly large game with sophisticated modeling and want to be sure that some kinds of message (such as the sanity-check) are always handled before other things that we might be doing at the before stage (such as generating implicit actions like opening doors before going through them). |