“Zealand” is in Denmark, but confusingly, New Zealand is actually named after Zeeland, in the Netherlands.
9 Likes
Boston, meanwhile, did have its geography significantly altered over the years, with major land reclamation projects and bridges and tunnels connecting previously-distinct areas, which is most of the explanation for the North End and South End things - those were the edges of the peninsula on which Boston was originally built, but they became less geographically distinct as the land around them filled in, and that peninsula is in the northern part of the modern city of Boston.
And yeah, they never updated the names, which I think is common practice in most cities (Paris might have done a bit of a reboot due to the Revolution, but I’m really struggling to think of other examples - I know in NYC the boundaries of what counts as Chinatown expanded at the expense of Little Italy, but that was an enormously contentious process reflecting a century of significant demographic change).
1 Like
Unlike Generalissimo Franco, Dave Barry is still alive!
All the posts in this thread have convinced me to improve the gameplay of my WIP, and I have just reached a major milestone in my work.
From the start, I aimed to present the game universe to the player through an extended scope perspective (location of the player - adjacent room - adjacent room in the same direction, and all of this this for each direction). I had already customized the Stately Gardens example from the documentation (fully understanding it was a very beneficial challenge) to enhance it with parameters such as room conformation, their sequences, light propagation, diminishing detail perception, etc.
In short, the subtlety here lies in not systematically overlapping the scope and the interaction possibilities with the content of this scope. The most technical points are probably the adjustment of visibility rules (in which the player’s physiological capacities play a role) and managing the impact of opening and closing conventional doors on the scope and visibility (I say “conventional” because the term “door” can be used to declare objects that are not doors in the common sense of this word).
What I quickly realized is that working with an extended scope forces, by gameplay structure, a certain degree of automation in displaying the surroundings to account for the evolving world model and what the player has already visited. For example:
To the **south**, at the very end of the small square, you notice a **large building** with wide openings from which a persistent smell of iodine and salt emanates, while to the **west**, beyond a pink granite arch, a **broad cobblestone avenue** stretches towards the port; you recognize Gaethan (Sadriel’s brother), your drinking companion.
The first task was to highlight the keywords usable for movement. Indeed, after reading the posts from various contributors, I thought it would be cool to let the player decide what they prefer among the options, if, for example, they want to examine the crowd:
Go south
south
s
Go to large building (even if the player is located five streets away and just remembered they forgot to take a look)
Go to the large building (same)
Go to the Large Building (same)
When the player has visited the place, the text remembers this knowledge like this:
To the **south**, at the very end of the small square, you notice the **fish market** with wide openings from which a persistent smell of iodine and salt emanates, while to the **west**, beyond a pink granite arch, a **broad cobblestone avenue** stretches towards the port; you recognize Gaethan (Sadriel’s brother), your drinking companion.
Which adds new ways to access this place:
Go to fish market (even if the player is five streets away and wants to return)
Go to the fish market (same)
Go to the Fish Market (same)
Go to Elena’s Shop (same - although in this case, it is the actual name of this room, as it appears as the title in the status bar when the player is there).
To make this type of navigation possible, allowing the player to decide what suits them best, I associated an “outside-description” with each room, a text produced by conditional substitution but always containing a “link,” itself a function of whether the place has been visited or not: this is what appears in bold when it’s not a direction.
Then, I based myself on the Misadventure example from the manual (which I was already using) to couple the Go by name action it proposes with a new homemade Go by link action that establishes the mapping between the text entered after the Go to... command and the corresponding room. That’s the basic principle, though there are a few other minor adjustments.
I’ve been testing this in a test area for about an hour now, and I found the added value for the player immense, but also for the author, as there are worlds and configurations where the proposed directions make no sense, and this allows us to suggest or invent others without forcing the player to learn them to navigate.
1 Like
constantly. every time I mix up directions (which is often) patrick’s voice echoes distantly in my head.
honesly this helps a lot. not perfectly, but a lot!
4 Likes
You know, now that I think of it, it’s kind of odd that the order we list the cardinal directions in English is usually north , south, east, and west considering that:
English is a western European Language, Europe is the western part of the “Old World”, the majority of the anglosphere both in population and land mass is in the western hemisphere, English is read from left to right, west is on the left side of maps in standard orientation. Every thing about our language suggests West should come first, yet it’s usually East that comes first when listing directions. Is it because Left is the “evil” side of things(I understand the English word sinister even comes from the Latin for left)?
2 Likes
The only thing I can think of is that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. The sun, obviously, was important to navigation before compasses, and the day cycle starts with sunrise and ends with sunset.
which is the right interpretation of the NSEW order. Night was the bane of Sailors during the oar and sail era and Polaris is the most important star, then the course-defining rising of the Sun (no wonder that there’s mythological relationship between Pelorus (the cape, and the instrument) Charbydis and Scylla (the antique twin hazards of the Sicilian strait) so, the pre-compass determination of the course was centered on North (via Polaris) and East (via the rising Sun)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
2 Likes
Smacks forehead Can’t believe I didn’t think of the sun’s apparent path of travel. And now I wonder if any languages have words for east and west that could be translated as dawnward and duskward… and if aborigines(or any other group native to the southern hemisphere and thus unable to see Polaris) tend to emphasize south over north in their native tongue. I’m also reminded that all bearings that aren’t due east or west spiral towards the poles.
1 Like
Latin does; “orient” (orientem) = “rising”, “occident” (occidentem) = “setting”.
4 Likes
I’m sure this was mentioned up-thread as it’s used in an Inform 7 example about creating directions:
Sunwise, sunward or deasil (sometimes spelled deosil), are terms meaning to go clockwise or in the direction of the sun , as seen from the northern hemisphere. The opposite term is widdershins (Lowland Scots), or tuathal (Scottish Gaelic).
And I just realized clockwise matches the apparent motion of the sun looking down on the north pole.
1 Like
This one’s not a coincidence! Shadows move the same direction the sun does, so early mechanical clocks were designed to turn the same direction sundials did.
4 Likes
And now I wonder how Sundials would function on Tatooine, Namek, or Trisol.
1 Like
Depends on the configuration of the orbits. If the planet orbits the centre of mass of the binary system far away compared to the average distance between stars, then everything would cast two shadows relatively close by. A regular sundial is still useful, if you take the bisector of the angle the shadows make as a rough indicator of direction.
If the planet describes a secondary orbit around one of the stars and the other one is further away, things get complicated depending on the relative mass of the stars and the orbit’s stability. And this is for binary systems. Ternary and more complex configurations won’t likely have stable orbits anyway and meta-stable ones can get pretty messy. Sundials will work, of course: shadows cast by individual stars can be told apart with a sufficiently precise spectrometre (as no stars have exactly the same light spectrum) but it takes more ingenuity than I have to find a way to make them useful for time or orientation purposes…
3 Likes
I have something like this, the year is a big square, three-ish months per side. So right now I feel like I’m in the bottom left. I think I looked at a year-long wall calendar once as a child and then formed my internal sense of the year based on that. Something like this:
Like others here, I flip around east and west when visualising room directions in parser games all the time. I’ve got a theory for this: E comes before W in the alphabet, so an E feels like it should be to the left of the W.
4 Likes