Chapter 8: Vehicles, Animals and Furniture
§8.1. Bicycles, Cars and Boats; §8.2. Ships, Trains and Elevators; §8.3. Animals; §8.4. Furniture; §8.5. Kitchen and Bathroom
![]() | Contents of The Inform Recipe Book |
![]() | Chapter 7: Other Characters |
![]() | Chapter 9: Props: Food, Clothing, Money, Toys, Books, Electronics |
![]() | Indexes of the examples |
§8.1. Bicycles, Cars and Boats
The vehicle kind in Inform refers to an object which can carry at least one person, but is small enough to fit into a single location:
In the Garden is a vehicle called the motor mower.
We can then apply different rules to a player going somewhere on foot or in the vehicle. Peugeot (a bicycle) is an easy example; No Relation (a car) adds an ignition switch to the vehicle; Straw Boater (a motorboat) gets around areas of lake where travel on foot is not just slower but impossible.
Hover (a sci-fi "hover-bubble") changes the appearance of the landscape when it is seen from inside the vehicle.
See Ships, Trains and Elevators for larger conveyances
![]() | Start of Chapter 8: Vehicles, Animals and Furniture |
![]() | Back to Chapter 7: Other Characters: §7.16. Social Groups |
![]() | Onward to §8.2. Ships, Trains and Elevators |
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We need to designate certain rooms as roads. Since the status of being a road will not change during play, we do this with a kind:
(In the course of the writing of Inform 7, much of Trafalgar Square was pedestrianised, making this example already out of date.) A further technical note: notice "going by a vehicle" in the above rule, rather than "going by something". A rule such as "Instead of going by something..." will be matched whenever the player tries to go some direction while in an enterable object, whether or not that object is actually capable of movement. This is sometimes useful, but in this case we want the warning to apply only when the player is in a vehicle; if we added Trafalgar Square's statue bases to the scenario, we would not want
So we restrict the rule to "Instead of going by a vehicle..." |
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We need to designate certain rooms as roads. Since the status of being a road will not change during play, we do this with a kind:
(In the course of the writing of Inform 7, much of Trafalgar Square was pedestrianised, making this example already out of date.) A further technical note: notice "going by a vehicle" in the above rule, rather than "going by something". A rule such as "Instead of going by something..." will be matched whenever the player tries to go some direction while in an enterable object, whether or not that object is actually capable of movement. This is sometimes useful, but in this case we want the warning to apply only when the player is in a vehicle; if we added Trafalgar Square's statue bases to the scenario, we would not want
So we restrict the rule to "Instead of going by a vehicle..." |
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