How many rooms is too many?

Is there an upper limit on rooms, items, actors, scenes, conversation tables, or other elements? At what point does Inform start to choke?

I’m trying to limit the items in this game, primarily because I’m looking for a big beefy warrior style, fighting and trash-talking and lifting heavy things, rather than a packrat who hauls a multitude of trinkets and geegaws. I’m hoping to avoid XP, levels, and merchants who sell lists of junk you won’t use. However, it looks to be on balance more filled with rooms, actors and conversations than otherwise.

Is there some rule of thumb, like 1 room = 50K of memory, or something?

I would guess that a room takes exceedingly little memory. But I wouldn’t worry, if I were you: a Glulx file can be up to 4GB, if I recall correctly, which probably means that it can contain millions of rooms.

There are limits in z-code output; sometimes they can be pretty tight.

There are limits in Glulx … but you’d have to almost go out of your way to get anywhere near them.

A “room” can mean so many different things, at so many levels of detail, that you’ll basically need to find a personal version of that rule of thumb re your own design style. I don’t think any generalities apply, really.

But those who know much more are likely to chime in soon.

Everything costs RAM, and the Z-machine only has 64k. But the memory usage of any given element of your game depends entirely on how complex it is.

Result: there are no simple answers, unfortunately.

So it allocates memory at need, or at compile time? That’s good. I was thinking that every time you declare a specific object, it sets aside a certain footprint of memory. (Don’t ask why I thought that; I’m no programmer.)

If you’re compiling for the z-machine you can see some numbers for your game under the contents tab in the index (near the bottom).