Chapter 2: Adaptive Prose
§2.1. Varying What Is Written; §2.2. Varying What Is Read; §2.3. Using the Player's Input
![]() | Contents of The Inform Recipe Book |
![]() | Chapter 1: How to Use The Recipe Book |
![]() | Chapter 3: Place |
![]() | Indexes of the examples |
§2.1. Varying What Is Written
Before getting to actual recipes, many recipe books begin with intimidating lists of high-end kitchen equipment (carbon-steel pans, a high-temperature range, a Provencal shallot-grater, a set of six pomegranate juicers): fortunately, readers who have downloaded Inform already have the complete kitchen used by the authors. But the other traditional preliminaries, about universal skills such as chopping vegetables, boiling water and measuring quantities, do have an equivalent.
For us, the most basic technique of IF is to craft the text so that it smoothly and elegantly adapts to describe the situation, disguising the machine which is never far beneath the surface. This means using text substitutions so that any response likely to be seen more than once or twice will vary.
M. Melmoth's Duel demonstrates three basic techniques: an ever-changing random variation, a random variation changing only after the player has been absent for a while, and a message tweaked to add an extra comment in one special case. (Random choices can be quite specifically constrained, as Ahem shows in passing.) Fifty Ways to Leave Your Larva and Fifty Times Fifty Ways show how a generic message can be given a tweak to make it a better fit for the person it currently talks about. Curare picks out an item carried by the player to work into a message, trying to make an apt rather than random choice. Straw Into Gold demonstrates how to have Inform parrot back the player's choice of name for an object.
Another reason to vary messages is to avoid unnatural phrasing. Ballpark turns needlessly precise numbers - another computerish trait - into more idiomatic English. (Likewise Numberless, though it is really an example demonstrating how to split behaviour into many cases.) Prolegomena shows how to use these vaguer quantifiers any time Inform describes a group of objects (as in "You can see 27 paper clips here.").
Blink, a short but demanding example from the extreme end of Writing with Inform, shows how the basic text variation mechanisms of Inform can themselves be extended. Blackout demonstrates text manipulation at a lower level, replacing every letter of a room name with "*" when the player is in darkness.
Inform's included extension Complex Listing allows us more control over the order and presentation of lists of items.
For how to change printed text to upper, lower, sentence, or title casing, see Rocket Man.
![]() | Start of Chapter 2: Adaptive Prose |
![]() | Back to Chapter 1: How to Use The Recipe Book: §1.4. Information Only |
![]() | Onward to §2.2. Varying What Is Read |
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There is only so much we can cram into a text property, so being able to swap in properties is useful but limited. Fortunately, we can also, if we want, create new phrases for how to say things in brackets:
Now to provide some meaning to these bracketed forms. We'll start with the easy one:
This is a "to say" phrase; we will learn more about phrases in a later chapter, but for now it may be enough to observe that whatever we write after "to say..." becomes a valid substitution in bracketed speech. In this particular case there is no advantage to using the boast token rather than spelling the text out in the quotation, but we might in theory add further instructions to randomize the output, for instance. To say phrases can be more complex, as well, since we can have them incorporate extra information:
Here where we have (speaker - a person), we are leaving a slot which we can later fill in, madlibs-like, with any person we like. That is why we can write "insult for the noun": we are summoning the To say phrase and telling it to fill in the identity of the unknown speaker with the noun. This differs from "insult of the noun" in the previous example; in that case, each person had his own insult property, and were merely printing that property out. Here we are actually telling Inform to calculate anew what the insult should be, and giving it some instructions about how to do that. Our instructions can also get arbitrarily complex:
So the effects we can get with text substitutions are quite flexible. We could even, if we wanted, fill in the substitutions by random choice, or by selecting items from a long list or table, should we have so bellicose a set of characters that they cannot make do with one or two insulting remarks apiece. |
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There is only so much we can cram into a text property, so being able to swap in properties is useful but limited. Fortunately, we can also, if we want, create new phrases for how to say things in brackets:
Now to provide some meaning to these bracketed forms. We'll start with the easy one:
This is a "to say" phrase; we will learn more about phrases in a later chapter, but for now it may be enough to observe that whatever we write after "to say..." becomes a valid substitution in bracketed speech. In this particular case there is no advantage to using the boast token rather than spelling the text out in the quotation, but we might in theory add further instructions to randomize the output, for instance. To say phrases can be more complex, as well, since we can have them incorporate extra information:
Here where we have (speaker - a person), we are leaving a slot which we can later fill in, madlibs-like, with any person we like. That is why we can write "insult for the noun": we are summoning the To say phrase and telling it to fill in the identity of the unknown speaker with the noun. This differs from "insult of the noun" in the previous example; in that case, each person had his own insult property, and were merely printing that property out. Here we are actually telling Inform to calculate anew what the insult should be, and giving it some instructions about how to do that. Our instructions can also get arbitrarily complex:
So the effects we can get with text substitutions are quite flexible. We could even, if we wanted, fill in the substitutions by random choice, or by selecting items from a long list or table, should we have so bellicose a set of characters that they cannot make do with one or two insulting remarks apiece. |
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