Many of my ideas lately hinge on being able to make something real time. I’ve heard this is possible with I7 (I know it is with I6–I’ve played with Time and Dwarves) but I have no idea how to go about it. It’s done in very few lines in I6, so I imagine it to be easy, but I have almost no understanding of I6, so I don’t know how to convert one to the other. Would I need to edit the standard rules? How do I do it?
Hi Shui, for starters, there is this thread on RAIF about ‘Realtime in I7’:
Now talking more generally about real time, I’m guessing you want events to proceed in your game not on the turn, but on some real time tick – like every second, for example. Is that correct?
In that case, I think you’ll want to go in one of two directions. Either the game has some central timer that polls all the relevant objects every tick to see if they want to do anything. Or, there is a queue or stack of time based events, whereby an object does something when the timer on the event in the stack expires. The game checks the top (i.e., item with least time remaining) event on the stack every increment (say, every .1 second, or second, or whatever), and if that event is ready to go, it executes, and the game moves on to the next top event in the stack.
Yes, I would like events to proceed on a real time tick.
I suppose I could go either stack or poll. As far as I can see, both get me the results I want. At least providing that the stack method allows for simultaneous actions, and neither is significantly taxing on resources. What would you suggest?
Apologies but my knowledge of Inform is too limited for me to know. Perhaps someone else will chime in or you can try this question on RAIF.