Wonder if someone can help me understand something here. I have this source:
Instead of attacking the door:
say "In a fit of rage, you bash the door into pieces, yelling 'HULK SMASH!' just to sound cool.";
now the wooden door is unlocked;
now the wooden door is open;
now the pile of wooden door pieces is in Outside House;
remove the wooden door from play.
As it turns out, the last line causes a runtime error of “Run-time problem P44: Attempt to remove a door from play.” Still investigating that. But something else occurred to me. If someone breaks the door, while I want the door to be gone, I want to the pieces of the door to be visible in both the locations that the door connects, which is Outside House and House. It’s not clear to me how to reuse an object like that.
So if the player picks up the door pieces in Outside House, they of course won’t be visible in the House either. And vice versa. It seems that I need the wooden door pieces to be the same object but just referenceable form two locations.
Having objects that are visible in more than one room is traditionally done by backdrops; see section 3.9 of Writing with Inform. As the documentation says there, backdrops are usually scenery which would make them impossible to pick up, but maybe you can make one that can be picked up? You could try it and see. Though I think it would be a good idea to make it so that when the player picks it up it quietly gets replaced with something that isn’t a backdrop.
Honestly unless it’s important that it work the way you describe, I’d be tempted to just create two different piles of wooden door pieces and put one in each room.
About removing the door from play, one thing you could do to work around that is just change the printed name and description of the door so that it’s something like “the yawning smashed doorframe” and make it open and unopenable. Moving doors during play is hard; there may be extensions to do it but probably it’s just easier to leave the door there and change its description and properties. It also adds a bit of verisimilitude – it’s not like the doorframe is gone after the door is smashed.
Open, right? After the door is smashed you should be able to go through it, and “unopenable” means you can’t close it, unless I’m spacing out.
At least I assumed that was the effect that was intended by removing the door from play – opening up a passage between the two rooms rather than severing the map connection.