Informalize

Here's a question I've been trying to figure out. Is there a simple way to move every item from a container to a different room? Something like: "Move everything from the red box to the closet", where the closet is not necessarily the parent of the red box?

Thanks,
Caleb

Here's the entire code:

Texture is a kind of value. The textures are unremarkable, rough, smooth, or tacky.

A thing has a texture. A thing is usually unremarkable.

A stick is a kind of thing. A stick is usually smooth.

Ground Floor is a room. In the Ground Floor are a smooth ball and a tacky stick. A stick called a mage staff is here.

Instead of touching something:
say "[The noun] feels [texture of the noun]."

One of the features I implemented for the original Anchorhead was an "auto-examine" procedure, where the first time you picked up an object it would automatically print the object's description along with the confirmation for taking it.

This turned into an interesting exercise in Inform 7. The solution was tricky but surprisingly elegant.

Thanks to inky (Dan Shiovitz): Adding this allows negative numbers, though he notes: "it'll only handle negative numbers as large (small) as -999 -- anything below that is also returned as -999." Still very cool, and invaluable.

( Read more... )

Crosslisted to RAIF.

How would one code this in i7?

There is a stereo in the room. The stereo has dial.

Basically, how do I do the user input thing?

Thanks in Advance!
-Mordy

I've been quiet around here lately; I was on vacation for a week and busy working on my project the rest of the time. I've just finished a milestone, however: the first five rooms of Anchorhead, fully implemented.

I'm posting the full source code here for anyone interested. There's some interesting stuff in there -- a simple system for generating and disposing of quantities of various kinds of water, several new verbs, even a small hack into Inform 6. Please feel free to peruse it, compile and play it -- certainly tell me if you see any bugs.

My impressions of Inform 7 after putting this together have only improved. There is a learning curve, especially if you're used to doing things in I6, and there is some merit to the complaints that the natural language syntax is more structured than it invites you to think it is, but both of these are hurdles quickly overcome with practice. Once I got the basic ideas down, I found coding in I7 to be far more straightforward than I6. My favorite feature by far is the ability to track actions and states by referring them to the past tense. Where before I would have to set up a procedure to flag an arbitrary variable, and then set up a procedure in some entirely different place to check that variable, now I can just ask, "Have we pushed this button before? No? Then do this." It's a great example of how much better I7 is for directly and succinctly talking about the state of the game-world.

--------------------

Has anyone figured out a way to test for "plural-ness" in I7? For example, I want to create a custom message like this:

The description of a thing is usually "Just [if noun is plural]some[otherwise]an[end if] 
ordinary-looking [noun]."

However, I7 doesn't seem to have an explicit property for plural-ness, or else I'm just too dense to find it.

I checked both the Inform website's copy and my Inform app.

I'm getting the following result:

U-Stor-It Facility
You can see a sea trunk (closed), a shipping crate (closed) and a metal box (on which is a small card) here.

>x trunk
The sea trunk is closed, and there is a small card on top.

>x crate
The shipping crate is closed, and there is a small card on top.

>x box
The metal box is closed, and there is a small card on top.

>

After printing the name of a chest (called the item) while listing contents of a room:
    if a lid (called the second item) which supports something is part of the item
    begin;
        say " (on which [is/are list of things on the second item])";
        omit contents in listing;
    end if.

I have a problem for you all.

I'm trying to implement a random wanderer who uses open doors and clamours at closed ones.

( Ok, no point beating around the bush -- it's my cat, Squeaker. )

Okay, here's a challenge.

Write a rule for doors so that when they are closed, they do not appear in the list of nondescript objects; but when they are open, they get a separate paragraph reading, "The [name of door] is open."

http://informalize.xorph.com/

I've set the licensing to CC-Attribution, and I've disabled anonymous edits for the moment. I'll change these if the community votes otherwise.

Did anybody have a particular theme in mind for the wiki? I'd be happy to set it up if you do; I can get rid of the generic flower icon, but my experience skinning MediaWiki is limited. Also, blacksnail, let me know your username there if you'd like admin rights.

Poking around, I found two solid options for a free Wiki host. Let me know what you think, considering this will serve as a helpful guide and recipe book for our work here. If anyone is willing to actually host a Wiki, please let us know! I figure offloading the hosting and maintenance to a third party is in our best interest, letting us work on Inform.

[EDIT] The Informalize wiki can now be found at informalize.xorph.com
( Deprecated text below )

I'd like to brainstorm some code challenges. I'm still reading the documentation at this point so I may need to move challenges around in the list if INFORM 7 makes it very easy or hard to do soemthing. Generally I'm approaching these as "meet X goal" with the idea being to use specific aspects of INFORM 7 rather than providing a laundry list of "use x aspect of INFORM 7" as challenges. I encourage you to suggest elements that you'd like to see someone include in a game, or that you need help with for a game of your own.

Reply in the comments with any ideas you have and if it sounds interesting, challenging, and unique, I'll add it to the list and credit you.

( Code Challenge brainstorm )

This is a question for emshort, since it's specifically about her "Basic Screen Effects" extension: Is there a way to capture the specific keystroke when using the phrase wait for any key?

For example, the original Anchorhead has several splash pages and a long introductory text. I wanted to allow players who were merely returning to a saved game the opportunity to skip all that, so the first page says, "Press 'R' to restore a game, any other key to begin."

I can recreate the game's introduction, but I don't see any way to figure out which key the player presses after a wait for any key command. (Although I note that the skein records it.) Is there a simple way to do this, or do I need to drop down to Inform 6?

Okay, I didn't expect to be stumped already, but here I am. I'm trying to make an umbrella, which can be open or closed. I can't just give it the property "openable", because it's not a container. I could create a special kind of thing called "umbrella" that can be open or closed, but there's only one umbrella in the game and it seems a bit of a waste to create a whole kind just for one object.

Has anyone figured out if you can define a property for a single object, or should I just create a kind?

Hello, all. I'm Caleb. I've been digging into I7 over the past few days, and making some headway. One thing I haven't been about to do yet is modify the start-of-game banner to my satisfaction. (Not that this is particularly important, but I see the banner every single time I start the game, so I tend to obsess about getting it exactly right.)

What I want the banner to look like is something like this:

( Read more... )

Another element I intend for this community to provide is an environment in which you can develop your INFORM 7 based projects and receive mutual support, ideas, and feedback when stumped. As the focus of this community is the INFORM 7 engine, I'd like to keep discussion more on ways of making INFORM 7 projects run than treatises on how to write IF, character development, IF theory, etc. Various newsgroups and discussion boards out there offer all kinds of advice on those topics, so please use them for that and try to keep the focus here on INFORM 7. I'm certainly not suggesting I'm going to plonk your posts if you ever talk about "plot stuff," but try to keep the ratio tilted more towards accomplishing your goals with the engine. (Also important: if you happen to be Critiquey McCritiquerson on various newsgroups or discussion boards, this community exists to make these things functional, not necessarily to make them good stories, spell-checked, or grammatically correct. Remember the rules and you should be fine.)

This post may be short, but I consider this to be more important than the Code Challenge stuff I talked about earlier. Both are here if you need them and each works better with a modicum of participation. There's not much more to say about it nor any required process to it. If you're somebody who likes structure, then presumably you can introduce your project in a post, state your project goals, and then add a tag to all posts relating to your project so that it's easier to group them all together. If we get slammed by 400 active INFORM 7 projects (hah!) I'll revisit the issue, but for now we're good to go.

So, who has an INFORM 7 project that needs support?

Just wanted to draw people's attention to Graham Nelson's "Natural Language, Semantic Analysis and Interactive Fiction" (available from the downloads section of the Inform website). It's a really good discussion of the research and analysis that went into development of Inform 7, particularly the "natural language" syntax. The second half of the paper gets pretty technical, and you can probably skip it unless you're really into set theory, model theory, and predicate calculus or, like me, you just like reading big words. But the first half of the paper is very accessible, and goes into why the GUI was designed the way it is, and why natural language syntax seems to fit so well with IF development.

I suppose it won't necessarily help you code better, but it's pretty interesting nonetheless.

As mentioned earlier, I'd like for one of the features of this community to be a fairly regular code challenge. This is not a requirement for participation. If anything it's a chance to write INFORM 7 code just to see if you can do it. Think of these things as little experiments to see how to get the engine to perform under preset conditions, but if you're more interested in watching how somebody else does that, that's fine as well. This is by no means intended to be the focus of informalize, but instead a constant thing going on in the background that might spur you on for ideas on how to get the engine to do what you want. I'm thinking doing this weekly or biweekly depending on timing, availability, and interest. I'm fine with dates being flexible if everybody is swamped.

The idea for these is function over form - seeing the various ways you can go about something is much more helpful than looking for a "correct answer." I figure there are going to be three levels of complexity to these things, and I'll go with an alpine skiing metaphor for no particular reason (circle, square, diamond). If we become super proficient I can add in a double diamond, but I may require you to sign a liability waiver for accidental code death or dismemberment.

( Levels of Code Challenges )

( Further Guidelines )

Hi! If I haven't met you then I'm Zach, aka blacksnail. As those who know me can attest, I'm a pretty laid back guy. I prefer to approach this community as an informal gathering rather than a big party or an academic conference, so please apply the appropriate etiquette. My ground rules for this place are pretty simple:

a) Don't get preachy, whether about politics, religion, game design, or English toffee. No matter how much you care about Topic X, this community exists to poke around with INFORM 7 and share code related to such. Don't go out of your way to offend, and don't go out of your way to take offense.
b) Stay on-topic - specifically INFORM 7 code snippets, using INFORM 7 to create games, etc. This isn't the place for game design theory, but instead a place to show up, share code, and get ideas on how to make it all work within the context of a game.
c) No porn. I personally don't care if you plan to use INFORM 7 to write interactive Harry Potter slash, but we are not your captive audience for same. If this offends your sensibilities, see a) above.
d) Don't be a jerk. I am the sole judge of jerkiness. Play nice or play elsewhere. I don't plan to swing the modhammer unless I absolutely need to, but I want everybody to note its presence on my belt.

That said, let's talk about INFORM 7. After some initial familiarization with the engine I plan to hold some informal adventure-creation "contests" that challenge you to use certain INFORM 7 elements to create short scenes ("create a car chase using command X") or different ways to go about accomplishing certain tasks to see exactly how ("come up with a non-random maze that moves as you're inside it, but that can be observed and manipulated from within"). Let's figure out just what's under the hood and what we can do with it. I am far more concerned here with actual code than with the quality of the writing, so don't worry if it sounds lame, we're working with proofs of concept here, not the Infocom edition of Gravity's Rainbow.

Because we're dealing with code snippets which can take up a lot of space, be sure to familiarize yourself with the LJ Cut for anything that's more than a page of text on your screen. If you don't know what this means then mention it here and I'll give you a rundown in the comments. If a page of text in a post is too much for your friends page, I can provide suggestions as well.

That's it. Get cracking!