§3.4. Continuous Spaces and The Outdoors
Suppose we want to blur the boundaries between rooms, in an environment where there are no walls: out of doors, for instance?
The simplest cases involve making something exceptional visible in more than one place. Carnivale features an exceptionally large landmark seen by day; Eddystone an exceptionally bright one by night. Waterworld allows a very distant object (the Sun) to be seen throughout many rooms, but never approached. View of Green Hills gives the player an explicit command for looking through into an adjacent room.
Three systematic examples then present outdoor landscapes with increasing sophistication. Tiny Garden gives the multiple rooms of an extended lawn descriptions which automatically adapt to say which directions lead into further lawn area. Rock Garden provides a relation, "connected with", between rooms, allowing items in one to be seen from the other: an attempt to interact with a visible item in a different area of the garden triggers an implicit going action first. Stately Gardens provides a much larger outdoor area, where larger landmarks are visible from further away, and room descriptions are highly adaptive.
In an outdoor environment, the distinction between a one-move journey and a multiple-move journey is also blurred. Hotel Stechelberg shows a signpost which treats these equally.
See Position Within Rooms for making the space within a room continuous
See Windows for another way to see between locations
See Doors, Staircases, and Bridges for still a third way to be told at least what lies adjacent
See Passers-By, Weather and Astronomical Events for more on describing the sky
![]() | Start of Chapter 3: Place |
![]() | Back to §3.3. Position Within Rooms |
![]() | Onward to §3.5. Doors, Staircases, and Bridges |
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Sometimes we want to make a list of something too complicated to express in a say list... phrase. When this happens, we can instead mark all the items we want to mention as "marked for listing". In this case, we have a lawn area made up of four rooms. We want each room to automatically describe the directions leading to the other parts of the lawn. To do this, we will first determine which directions are relevant and mark those for listing, then list them.
The following phrase goes through all the directions in the compass and marks the ones that are interesting to us at the moment.
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Sometimes we want to make a list of something too complicated to express in a say list... phrase. When this happens, we can instead mark all the items we want to mention as "marked for listing". In this case, we have a lawn area made up of four rooms. We want each room to automatically describe the directions leading to the other parts of the lawn. To do this, we will first determine which directions are relevant and mark those for listing, then list them.
The following phrase goes through all the directions in the compass and marks the ones that are interesting to us at the moment.
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