A question about doing something with menus.

[matt_weiner (matt w)]

@pashaimeru

Oh wow, thanks a ton. That’s actually really nice, compared to the horrible mess I was about to do.

To say explore (L - a place): if L is the forest: choose a blank row in Table of Locations; now title entry is "Mountains"; now subtable entry is Table of Location_mountains; otherwise if L is the mountains: now player is carrying a rubber ball; otherwise: say "You explore [the L] but don't find much of anything"; decrease the menu depth by 3.
About this, though. Let’s say I want fifty different things that can happen when the player explores the forest. This seems like a bit subpar way of doing it, if it gets long like that; what’d be a better one? Lists or tables as VictorGijsbers recommended?

I’m not super-informed on this, but I would go for tables. They can be more flexible – you can include additional columns to keep track of things like whether the row can be used again or should be blanked out after use, and whether the row has been used, and things like that. Also, as I learned the hard way, lists are memory hogs; they can be expanded dynamically, so Inform leaves a lot of space for them to expand.

EDIT: And, depending on how you manage the tables, you might find that this lets you streamline the to-say phrase further. Declare “Every place has a table called exploration-table. The exploration-table is usually the Table of Nothing Interesting Happening.” and then you could just have the “explore L” phrase call a random row from the exploration-table of L and do – well, whatever it is you’re planning to do with the table. You’d need to find some way of having a table row do things like adding “mountains” to the available locations; maybe this could be done by having a column of stored actions that might be called, and then defining an action on a place that adds the place to the Table of Locations?