§9.11. Clocks and Scientific Instruments
The simplest form of clock is a wrist watch. Here is a choice of analogue or digital:
The player wears a wrist watch. The description of the wrist watch is "It is [the time of day in words]."
The player wears a digital watch. The description of the digital watch is "It is [the time of day]."
Better clocks would allow us also to set the time, and to stop and start them: see Tom's Midnight Garden.
Scientific instruments provide sharper versions of our own senses. In the case of vision, they allow us to see closer up, or further away. It's a convention of IF that people can normally see only the current location, that is, they cannot see from one location into another. The boundary of the current room is like a horizon, even out of doors (though it's true that there are ways to disguise that with a continuous outdoor landscape). Ginger Beer provides a telescope able to see into other rooms.
Witnessed 2 provides a meter which measures how close a ghost is to the player.
See Continuous Spaces and The Outdoors for more on seeing into adjacent locations
See Heat for infrared goggles
![]() | Start of Chapter 9: Props: Food, Clothing, Money, Toys, Books, Electronics |
![]() | Back to §9.10. Telephones |
![]() | Onward to §9.12. Cameras and Recording Devices |
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Suppose we want to have a pair of linked lenses so that the player can look into one of them and see things which occur in room containing the other lense. We begin simply with a bit of environment for the player to wander around:
Now for the lenses themselves:
Here is the critical bit, which needs to be somewhat flexible, since the large end of the telescope could in theory be left anywhere in the game (and should still work).
We also want to make sure that the player who looks through the small lense does not see the large lense listed among the contents of the other location:
And we're done. |
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Suppose we want to have a pair of linked lenses so that the player can look into one of them and see things which occur in room containing the other lense. We begin simply with a bit of environment for the player to wander around:
Now for the lenses themselves:
Here is the critical bit, which needs to be somewhat flexible, since the large end of the telescope could in theory be left anywhere in the game (and should still work).
We also want to make sure that the player who looks through the small lense does not see the large lense listed among the contents of the other location:
And we're done. |