I know that you can prevent saving in a certain area of a game if you wish.
Is there a way to code “UNDO” only when you’re in a certain area of the game or not.
“Undo Output Control” by Erik Temple. inform7.com/extensions/Erik%20Te … index.html
and “Conditional Undo” by Jesse McGrew. inform7.com/extensions/Jesse%20M … index.html
I honestly believe that any design that blocks save or undo is a failure. I know Infocom did this in a few end game scenarios and it does force the player to a certain level of heightened suspense…I just think that can be done through prose and scene construction.
The new Textfyre portal will allow game play in such a way that the player can jump to any past turn, offering a tree or skein of all current play. Once you remove the concept of saves and undo, you find interesting ideas popping into your head. For instance, we generally shy away from putting a game in an unwinnable state, but if you had the ability to jump to any past point, this becomes much less important. We can offer dead-ends that are meaningful to the larger story without forcing the player to figure out where exactly they should have saved a game.
You could have responses that relate to time…so something like…
It seems you may have drawn the wrong conclusion. When you chose to break the mirror in the board room and jump onto the ledge, you went up when you might have gone down.
But knowledge gained from the wrong fork may lead to insight (not necessarily solving a puzzle) into progressing the story. Consider a dead-end as the opportunity for a set of hints.
The User Interface can have links or buttons or some visual clue to help you jump to the point where you might alter your path through the story.
David C.
These days, I tend to regard any need for the explicit state management commands (SAVE / RESTORE / UNDO / RESTART) as a greater design failure.
I could see blocking UNDO if the player cannot get stuck or reach a sub-optimal node. In that case it might be appropriate to deny the command as a way of keeping the player moving forward, rather than allowing him to get sidetracked on micro-managing game state.
Also, multiple UNDOs are ugly and confusing without some kind of interface support that cleans up the transcript and erases the retracted action, as Undum does. Your TextFyre implementation offers that but most other systems do not.
I’d say this too can be accomplished with prose and scene construction. Make failures interesting and (clearly) recoverable without a lot of tedious retyping.
On the topic of disabling certain commands: for those playing Z-machine games in the latest Gargoyle, you can use the built-in /undo command to undo a turn even if the game doesn’t provide support. Similarly, you can use /save to save a game even if the game has disabled saving, but you’ll have to use /restore to restore such games.
These are rather recent features, so do please let me know if you run into problems with them.
Thanks to all who answered my post. David C, Cressy, Ghalev, zarf
I don’t use Gargoyle, myself, but - great features!