MAX_STATIC_DATA maximum reached

[sai]

@ektemple

@sai

Decide on the the contondant-poing2-hitorganlist corresponding to a part-name of the part-name of the limb;

“the part-name of the part-name of the limb” is a good example of phrase that sometimes work but most of the time don’t for some reason… ^^;

If Inform is misinterpreting these constructions, you can use parentheses to group entities to help it get things right, e.g.:

the part-name of (the part-name of the limb)

–Erik

Very nice! I didn’t know it was possible ^^

[sai]

Capmikee, thank you for your example. I will use your model as a new base.
I think I have to rewrite everything anyway.
I doubt I could put everyone in a single table but in fact it looks simpler to manage if inform7 can handle this.
I may have 14 body parts, as many bones and again as many organs (I don’t count blood which will be processed separately). I plan to have less than 10 persons in the game but I would like to have an idea of how many persons could be supported by this system. How many rows could be considered as a limit (if not hard limit a limit that would make the game slow) ? Thank you.

@capmikee

I use lists for 2 things.
First to list the organs that are attached or inside a body part (in the table of body parts I have a column of organs lists). I didn’t really attached the objects to the persons because it became too big and broke some objects number limitations (while only 4 persons were in the game at the moment). So I use tables, properties and lists to simulate almost everything.

As I mentioned, you can use relations, but you can also use a table for this.

I use another 2 lists to track the damage of all the organs. So a list with all the organs and a list with their status. I can’t do this with a table since I need separate data for each person.

Sure you can. Inform won’t conveniently look up the row in the table for you if you need to constrain your search by two columns at once, but you can still loop through it manually. Didn’t we talk about this in an earlier thread? Here’s a working example that uses a Table of Tissue Containment as a reference to create a Table of Tissue Damage that records damage for every person. I’ve also written a couple of useful phrases to illustrate one possible style of phrase-writing you could employ:

[spoiler][code]Body part is a kind of value. Some body parts are head and pelvis.
Tissue type is a kind of value. Some tissue types are brain, blood, bone, muscle and testicles.
Gender is a kind of value. Some genders are any, masculine, and feminine.

Arena is a room. Hercules is a man in Arena. Xena is a woman in Arena.

Table of Tissue Containment
sex body area tissue maximum damage
any head brain 3
any head blood 5
any head bone 10
masculine pelvis testicles 2
any pelvis blood 5
any pelvis bone 15
feminine pelvis muscle 15
masculine pelvis muscle 10

Table of Tissue Damage
combatant (object) body area (value) tissue (value) damage (number)
with 24 blank rows [you must calculate number of people times number of rows in Table of Tissue Containment. You don’t need quite that many because of gender differences, but this is probably not where you’re going to run out of memory.]

When play begins:
repeat with the current combatant running through people:
repeat through Table of Tissue Containment:
If the sex entry fits the current combatant, create a record of damage for the tissue entry of body area entry in the current combatant;

To decide whether (identity - a gender) fits (combatant - a person):
if identity is any, yes;
if identity is masculine and combatant is male, yes;
if identity is feminine and combatant is female, yes;
no.

To create a record of damage for (the organ - a tissue type) of (the limb - a body part) in (combatant - a person):
Choose a blank row in Table of Tissue Damage;
Now combatant entry is combatant;
Now body area entry is the limb;
Now tissue entry is the organ;
Now damage entry is 0.

To decide what number is the maximum damage to (the organ - a tissue type) of (the limb - a body part) in (combatant - a person):
Repeat through Table of Tissue Containment:
if the sex entry fits the combatant and the body area entry is the limb and the tissue entry is the organ, decide on the maximum damage entry;

To decide what number is a randomly chosen record of damage for (current combatant - a person):
sort the Table of Tissue Damage in combatant order;
Let the first possible record be 0;
Let the current record be 0;
Repeat through Table of Tissue Damage:
increment the current record;
if the combatant entry is the current combatant and the first possible record is 0, now the first possible record is the current record;
if the combatant entry is not the current combatant and the first possible record is not 0:
decide on a random number between the first possible record and the current record - 1.

When play begins:
Choose row a randomly chosen record of damage for Hercules in Table of Tissue Damage;
say “[combatant entry] has sustained [damage entry] damage to the [tissue entry] in the [body area entry], out of a possible [maximum damage to tissue entry of body area entry in combatant entry].”;[/code][/spoiler]

[sai]

@Poster

@capmikee

That’s what the “pragmatic programmers” (Hunt & Thomas) call “programming by coincidence.” I admit that with the state of I7’s documentation, sometimes it’s the only way.

Which means that this will be the only way to solve your problem unless you discover something or someone else has discovered something that the documentation doesn’t mention. And the docs aren’t slated for any revision any time soon. Having fun yet? I7 is in a state of partial abandonment and it’s been that way since its inception.

Well, I7 is fun especially in the phrases, function names etc…
But functions and variables have not the clarity, functionality and dynamic properties we would like them to have. And especially tables, which must be processed by rows for example… All of this lack the flexibility which is the bliss of modern programming languages.
But you couldn’t write :

The universe is a room.
Bragok is a man in the universe.

in an other language and expect it to create the universe for you.

[sai]

@matt w

@Laroquod

@EmacsUser

The limit comes not from a compiler design decision but from the Z-Machine—it only gives you so many locals per function, and anything more than that means that the compiler can’t create a valid game file. (It could simulate extra locals, but that would be a lot of work for only marginal benefit.)

Thanks for that, but I wonder… if it’s a Z-machine issue, does that mean it could easily be avoided by compiling with glulx? It was my understanding that by compiling to glulx instead of the z-machine, there are no more serious limits. But this here is a serious limit.

It should be – zarf said that in glulx the limit is raised to 119, which seems like it should be enough for most purposes.

The problem is that I compile to glulx and have this error message…

[sai]

@Jim Aikin

@bukayeva

What would be “proper” documentation? I think the documentation is sometimes hard to use but that’s because I think there’s too many forward references and an uneven balance of detail. Do you mean just cleaning up the existing documentation or are you referring to entirely new material?

It was late at night when I wrote that. Perhaps “proper” was a poor word choice. It’s been a while since I spent any time with the I7 Documentation, but IIRC, its most telling weakness is that it assumes readers will only want or need to do easy things. On almost no page will you find a topic discussed in a complete, well-structured manner, complete with caveats. And as you said, there are not enough references to the pages where the topics are discussed in more detail. Sometimes, there are no such pages.

If you compare this, for instance, to the long, detailed page in the TADS 3 Technical manual called “How to Create Verbs,” the difference should be quite clear.

Yes this is a problem I have bumped all the time.
You have examples that explain you how to put clothes with underlying but the example works only with the player and a limited amount of clothes. In a game if you want to process clothes you have to test everyone with all the clothes, you can’t decide beforehand which clothes underlies which clothes because people size also differ, this system can’t be done with I7 built in functions and you need to make pure programming with tables and variables, which is very difficult in I7… same for combat and pretty much any simulation system. inform built in functions seem very attractive but they work, as it has been said, just as lipstick on the manual.

[Laroquod]

I agree with some suggestions above that the main failings of most of the i7 documentation I have tried to go by are (1) failure to avoid those forward references; and (2) failure to consider all possible forms of input (including fail modes) when describing any grammar function’s output. The latter is the worst offence: I often have to discover how a function will actually respond to my particular planned inputs by a process of trial & error to figure out how it fails. I have not investigated every possible manual out there though – only tried a few before I lost patience with ‘choosing a manual’ and just started to fill in the gaps with my own lab notes.

P.