I was playing around with Scopability but I noticed the example that comes with it doesn’t seem to work, if you extend it just slightly. To wit, if you “jump” (which reveals the artifact) and then try to take the alien artifact, you are told it’s still fixed in place. This is even though the code does remove the scenery property.
Is that a known thing about moving something into scope? I’m guessing not since it would seem against the intent of the extension.
I’m also curious about this because I found the archived away Hidden Items extension.
So I guess my question – beyond the possible scopability issue – would be more about why I would want to put something out of scope as opposed to just hiding it. From what I can tell, the impact on the player would be the same in that they can’t refer to something that’s hidden any more than they could if that same something was out of scope.
I just want to make sure there isn’t a nuance I’m missing.
About the first part, it’s not particularly to do with scope–it’s just that scenery and fixed in place are two different properties, and the example sets one but not the other. So in this code:
Cavern is a room. "Full of alien artifacts."
The alien artifact is scenery in cavern.
After jumping when the alien artifact is scenery:
say "You shake an alien artifact loose!";
now the alien artifact is not scenery;
now the alien artifact is not fixed in place.
you will be able to take the alien artifact after jumping. But if the last line is commented out, you won’t be able to take it.
(Anything defined as scenery is fixed in place by default, unless you say it isn’t, though you probably don’t want to define anything as portable scenery!)
As for why you’d want to use scopability, I guess it’s a world model sort of thing? Like if you have an object that has effects whenever it’s in the location, so you want it to really be in the location, but sometimes it’s hidden, so you don’t want the player to be able to refer to it.
Apologies for the delay in response. Thank you for the insight. I’m not sure why I didn’t draw the association about the difference between scenery and fixed in place. I think I got mono-focused on looking at what the I6 code was doing that I just assumed the “fixed in place” was due to being scenery.
Regarding the distinction, interestingly, I’m playing around with the idea of a “temporal observer” concept in my Trinity Remastered example, where it might make sense for that to be out of scope versus being hidden since “being hidden” implies in a specific location whereas the out of scope perhaps more easily makes sense as something “omnipresent.”
I’ll play around with it and see if one way or the other seems to make sense.