§4.3. Degrees of certainty
When we write:
A dead end is usually dark.
we are saying that it will be dark rather than lighted unless we should specify otherwise. So it would be fine to add:
The Tortuous Alcove is lighted.
because although dead ends are usually dark, this one is evidently an exception. On the other hand, if we had originally written
A dead end is always dark.
then Inform would not have permitted any exception to be made, and would have reported a problem if we had tried to make the Tortuous Alcove lighted. Besides "usually" and "always", we can also employ "seldom" and "never", which are their negatives. Thus, "never lighted" means the same as "always dark".
|
In recent years there has been a strong trend towards providing unique descriptions for all implemented objects. Often this is a good idea, but there are also contexts in which we may want to discourage the player from looking too closely at some things and concentrate his attention on just a few interesting ones. The trick here is that leaving items completely undescribed leads to rather dull exchanges like this:
...which can leave the player with the impression that the author was simply too lazy to describe everything. So it can be a good idea to replace that default message with a different one more appropriate to the game. For instance:
Because the description is attached to a whole kind ("thing"), it is really a blanket instruction about many objects at once. More specific instructions always override less specific ones, so we can easily make exceptions. For instance, the following will work correctly:
|
|
In recent years there has been a strong trend towards providing unique descriptions for all implemented objects. Often this is a good idea, but there are also contexts in which we may want to discourage the player from looking too closely at some things and concentrate his attention on just a few interesting ones. The trick here is that leaving items completely undescribed leads to rather dull exchanges like this:
...which can leave the player with the impression that the author was simply too lazy to describe everything. So it can be a good idea to replace that default message with a different one more appropriate to the game. For instance:
Because the description is attached to a whole kind ("thing"), it is really a blanket instruction about many objects at once. More specific instructions always override less specific ones, so we can easily make exceptions. For instance, the following will work correctly:
In recent years there has been a strong trend towards providing unique descriptions for all implemented objects. Often this is a good idea, but there are also contexts in which we may want to discourage the player from looking too closely at some things and concentrate his attention on just a few interesting ones. The trick here is that leaving items completely undescribed leads to rather dull exchanges like this:
...which can leave the player with the impression that the author was simply too lazy to describe everything. So it can be a good idea to replace that default message with a different one more appropriate to the game. For instance:
Because the description is attached to a whole kind ("thing"), it is really a blanket instruction about many objects at once. More specific instructions always override less specific ones, so we can easily make exceptions. For instance, the following will work correctly:
|