Is there a way to make all info in the status line vanish while a object is being examined?
(In this example examining a note displaying a quotation, a wall of text).
Or can this even be achieved as the entire screen, including where the status line used to be, would be used for displaying the quoted text?
After the text would have been displayed I would of course like the status line to be back just as before, displaying location and so on.
The only thing similar to this that I have seen is in the example"Blankness" by Emily Short.
But that just works at the very beginning of the story and has something to do with toying around with the virtual machine. (Me being a noob do not understanding much of that).
Is this effect possible to achieve?
I’m very new to i7 and a small example, rather than just a explanation would be extremely helpful.
Perhaps it would be more instructive to you if you posted the code you have written that’s not working. In this way, your coding errors can be pointed out and explained. Simply giving you a solution provides little instructional value.
Have you checked out boxed quotations? The syntax would be “display the boxed quotation (text)”.
From your brief description this seems to be a possibility. It does not clear the status line, but it does give relevance to the quoted text, by printing it beneath the status line in a sort of overlay that clears when you enter your next command.
If the text does not fill the whole screen, then the effect you seem to want would be invisible anyway - if you wanted the status line to reappear after the text was printed, and all the text was printed and it fit the game window, it would reappear instantly.
That was my first thought too – “while an object is being examined” is normally an interval of zero seconds.
This is not necessarily true. You could end the description with a “hit a key” pause, and it’s pretty easy to blank the status line during one of those. Or you could blank the status line until the beginning of the next turn (that is, unblank it at the “after reading the player’s command” stage).
Whether these are the effects you really want, that’s a separate question.
I think I complicated my question unnecessarily. The topic of the thread said it best.
I just want to display some quoted text and make the status line go away when the text is shown.
I have had problems with boxed quotations, because it do not display correctly in DOS under Frotz (In Windows its completely OK but in DOS it just show the very first letter of every line of the box in the right corner of the screen. This is odd because i have never seen that problem in DOS (on my sweet 486 laptop) with any of the .z5 .z8 -files that are not compiled by me (in 6G60). But this is another topic. All I want to do is just to get rid of the status line while showing some text).
Its the “pretty easy to blank the status line during one of those”-part of it that I cant figure out.
Thank you all for your comments so far!
(I will be offline for a week (meditation training), starting in 45 minutes so I will not be able to respond until then).
Include Basic Screen Effects by Emily Short.
The Kitchen is a room.
The rock is in the Kitchen.
Instead of examining the rock:
say "It's rocky.";
clear only the status line;
say "(Hit a key.)";
wait for any key.
(This relies on the fact that the wait-for-key routine doesn’t update the status line, which is arguably a bug, but let’s not worry about that for now…)
But maybe you want the status line to come back one turn later. For that effect, try:
The status-blank-flag is a truth state that varies.
For constructing the status line when status-blank-flag is true:
do nothing.
Instead of examining the rock:
say "It's rocky.";
now status-blank-flag is true.
After reading a command:
now status-blank-flag is false.
