The “Dubai” example in the Inform IDE is useful, but it doesn’t answer what might be a more specific and less complex question. For instance, the elevator there might not allow for stairs between floors, so you need a backdrop in all elevator-y rooms for simplicity.
I have a hub/spoke map in my game. There’s an item called a lift that can take you from, say, area 0 to areas 1-6. So the command LIFT 1 would put you into spoke 1, LIFT 0 to the hub, etc. The spokes do not overlap.
Is there any reason to prefer backdrops over, say, a
hub-room is a room.
the lift is scenery in hub-room.
spokegoing is an action applying to one number.
understand "lift [number]" as spokegoing.
carry out spokegoing:
let go-room be a room that varies.
if number understood > 0 or number understood < 6: say "Only 1-6, with 0 for the hub.";
if number understood is 0: now go-room is hub-room;
if number understood is 1: now go-room is spoke-1-room; [etc.]
if go-room is location of player, say "Already here.";
move lift to go-room;
move player to go-room;
Am I missing any functionality by going with scenery instead of a backdrop?
Certainly, for my code, backdrops seem to cause some unnecessary snarls in definitions and such and checking error cases. So I was wondering if there was any obvious reason I couldn’t get away with this.