§1.3. Disenchantment Bay
"Disenchantment Bay" is a simple work of IF used as a running example in Chapter 3 of Writing with Inform - not so much a tutorial as a convenient hook on which to hang some demonstrations of the basics. Because the resulting examples only use basic features and in the most straightforward way, they make for uninteresting "recipes" - so they are not included in the Recipe Book proper. But some readers might like to have all twelve stages of the example gathered on a single page: this is that page.
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To begin with the title: There are many Disenchantment Bays across the world, named by eighteenth-century ships' captains - one in Antarctica, another in Tasmania, for instance. The most famous is probably the one where Lewis and Clark's expedition broke through to the Pacific. But ours is the one in Alaska, named in 1791 by a Spanish navigator who had hoped it might lead to the fabled Northwest Passage, and all of this history is beside the point since the game is set in the present day.
We might want to start with the glass case.
Now Inform will have guessed that the case is a container, but its default idea of a container is something like a bucket: permanently open and not able to be opened and shut. We can change that:
We get a similar set of guesses if we write
Using "some" rather than "a" or "the" tells Inform that the cushions are to be referred to as a plural object in the future. And because of the "on the bench..." phrase, Inform will guess that the bench is a supporter and that it is fixed in place and cannot be moved from room to room. We do have to tell it that the bench can be sat on, though:
And now a short script, so that if we type TEST ME, we experiment with the case and bench:
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To begin with the title: There are many Disenchantment Bays across the world, named by eighteenth-century ships' captains - one in Antarctica, another in Tasmania, for instance. The most famous is probably the one where Lewis and Clark's expedition broke through to the Pacific. But ours is the one in Alaska, named in 1791 by a Spanish navigator who had hoped it might lead to the fabled Northwest Passage, and all of this history is beside the point since the game is set in the present day.
We might want to start with the glass case.
Now Inform will have guessed that the case is a container, but its default idea of a container is something like a bucket: permanently open and not able to be opened and shut. We can change that:
We get a similar set of guesses if we write
Using "some" rather than "a" or "the" tells Inform that the cushions are to be referred to as a plural object in the future. And because of the "on the bench..." phrase, Inform will guess that the bench is a supporter and that it is fixed in place and cannot be moved from room to room. We do have to tell it that the bench can be sat on, though:
And now a short script, so that if we type TEST ME, we experiment with the case and bench:
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