FLOOR or GROUND?

Authoring General Design Discussions
1

Hi all, opinions please:

When inside a building, would you refer to the floor as “the ground”? Conversely, when outside, would you refer to the ground as “the floor”?

TIA.

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2

In Return to the Stars, the game does talk about “the floor” or “the ground” depending on whether you’re inside or outside, but both terms are always accepted for player input (so x ground still works when inside, and vice versa).

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3

That’s what I’d recommend, in general, yeah.

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4

TADS 3 (whose library notoriously strive to cover all conceivable bases) define floor for indoor locations and ground for outdoor location.

OTOH, in British english, ground is an adjective (on this old world side of the Atlantic pond, we call “ground floor” what in the other side of said pond is called “first floor”), and this add another layer of parser complication…

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio
(whose indeed live at the ground floor of his eccentric mansion…)

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5

I define two base classes for locations called, INSIDE and OUTSIDE where;

Inside there are “walls”, “floor” (=ground) and
Outside there are “ground” (=floor) and “sky”.
Also some default descriptions.

Code looks like this:

WALLS@ THING
* name
walls
* name
wall

FLOOR@ THING
* name
floor
* name
ground

SKY@ THING
* name
the blue sky
* name
the sun

XFLOOR
* It keeps you from falling down!
* Don't bother with the ground, it's beneath you!

XWALLS
* The walls aren't really interesting.
* Looking at the walls won't help!

INSIDE@ ROOM
* x walls
XWALLS
* x floor
XFLOOR

OUTSIDE@ ROOM
* x sky
It's up there.
* x ground
XFLOOR
6

I would say just have both as possible synonyms, but floor when in a building and ground when outside.