I have a road East 7th Street.
East 1st Street, East 3rd Street and East 4th Street are all north of East 7th Street.
If I code it like that an expected error appears.
The question now, is there a way to overcome this problem?
Error message explain my problem better:
Problem. You wrote 'East 7th Street is south of East 4th Street, south of East 3rd Street and south of East 1st Street' , but in another sentence 'Gless Street is north of East 4th Street, south of East 3rd Street' : but this looks like a contradiction, which might be because I have misunderstood what was meant to be the subject of one or both of those sentences.
Not sure if I explained it correctly first time around.
What’s the desired behavior here? It’s fine to have different exits all lead to the same room (like, if you go S from any of E 1st, E 3rd, or E 4th, you wind up in E 7th) but one exit leading to different rooms is a challenge because then Inform doesn’t know what’s supposed to happen. So if you type N in E 7th, where are you supposed to go?
(If the idea is that it’s random, you can do that with an instead of going rule, I think).
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The idea is I am in east 7th street. Three streets, east 1st Street, East 3rd Street and east 4th Street is north of my position.
So if I want to go to any one of them I need to go north.
Any suggestions on how to do it in another way?
But which one will you actually go to if the player types North? Is the game supposed to pick one randomly? Or is one meant to be to the NE, one to the NW?
EDIT: this is like saying that a door opens into three different rooms. That kind of thing is generally physically impossible, so Inform needs more detail to understand exactly what you want to have happen!
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When I am in 7th Street and something happens, like a crime, in east 3rd street or in east 1st street or in east 4th street I need to be able to go directly to that particular street that are all north of my current position.
I am trying to build a region map for my project with streets that needs to be connected to each other to travel around.
Well, the easy way would be to just use other directions (Northeast and Northwest as well as north). If those are already used for other locations, though, I’d think a menu would be the easiest thing – so the player experience would something like this?
7th St.
>NWhere do you want to go?
- E 3rd Street
- E 1st Street
- E 4th Street
> 2
E 1st Street
>
There are a couple ways to do this, but are you already using a dialogue extension or other approach to choice-based gameplay elsewhere in the game? If so, I’d just use that for this case as well.
Look if that might work.
I am using Activity-based Simple Chat by Shadow Wolf extension for dialogue.
Will your suggestion work with that, if so can you give an example please.
Will this format fill in my map as well and connect everything to each other as intended?
I’m not familiar with that extension and unfortunately don’t have time right now to really figure it out and write sample code, but from a quick glance it looks like it should work – just have “an instead of going north when the location is 7th Street” rule which launches a chat node (can’t tell whether you’ll need to create a dummy NPC for this, or if there’s a way to just manually trigger a node), with quips corresponding to the three possible destinations; then a rule for giving text for each of the options that will move the player to the particular room.
This won’t fill in the map and connect everything as far as Inform is concerned – again, this is physically impossible under the standard rules, where I believe only one room can be mapped as the destination of a particular exit.
Thanks for all your help.
I will try and see if I can get this to work.
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It’s probably simpler if you first build the map the normal way and then have a vehicle or something take you where you want to go quicker. It will help the player have a better sense of what’s going on too, if the streets can be associated with a realistic street layout.
For example, if the streets are set up as rooms this way:
East 1st Street
|
East 3rd Street
|
East 5th Street
|
East 7th Street
where a | represents a normal north-south connection, then an alternate travel method (perhaps invoked with the menu selection mentioned above) could take you directly to whichever street is needed.
Are we a police officer charged with investigating crimes as they occur? Do we have a police car we could use to DRIVE TO FIRST STREET perhaps? Or maybe a tram or streetcar we could RIDE to get there directly? There are a number of plausible ways we could move around that wouldn’t compromise the map’s structural integrity.
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