I’m looking to introduce currency into my game. I checked out Nickle and Dimed which seems to comprehensively cover everything I need, with coins and bills of various values. It looks like Inform 7 naturally has a dollars/cents system. This works fine:
Price is a kind of value. $10.99 specifies a price with parts dollars and cents. A thing has a price. The price of a thing is usually $0.00.
Money is a kind of thing. Coin is a kind of money.
A dollar bill is a kind of money. The price of a dollar bill is $1.00. The printed name of a dollar bill is "dollar bill". Rule for printing the plural name of a dollar bill: say "dollar bills". The description of a dollar bill is "It has George Washington's head on the front, which with a bit of creative folding can be scrunched to look like a mushroom. All important things really are learned in kindergarten."
A five-dollar bill is a kind of money. The price of a five-dollar bill is $5.00. Understand "five" or "five dollar" as the five-dollar bill. The description of a five-dollar bill is "Abraham Lincoln. He looks slightly less dignified here than he does on the penny."
And so forth. Perfect for my use, but, I’m looking to use Drachma as the currency in my game, not dollars. Right now all the prices are printed with $.
Simply replacing the $ and dollar in the code with ₯ and drachma results in an error. I tried to create a rule that just prints $ as ₯ but couldn’t quite get that to work either.
I figured someone’s probably done this before and there’s probably a simple way to do this. If anyone could help it’d be greatly appreciated.
The source won’t be happy with ₯. Leave it as ‘$’ in the source or pick a different symbol, and then use the ₯ on output.
Price is a kind of value. %10.99 specifies a price with parts drachmas and leptons. A thing has a price. The price of a thing is usually %0.00.
To say (p - price): say "[unicode 8367][drachmas part of p][unicode 46][leptons part of p]".
when play begins: let account be %3.67; say account.
Your game will probably have to be played in a browser or via a bundled Lectrote app, though – other clients are likely to just print ‘?’ for ₯.
(Unicode 46 is just ‘.’. For whatever weird reason, a plain ‘.’ in the text for the say statement was generating a line break despite not being at the end of the text.)
So if you wanted to use a made-up currency, could you do it with English letters or keyboard symbols for an abbreviation? Like firkels abbreviated Fk or ^? Or would you always run into this trouble? Could @Lilt use Dp instead without trouble? I know this isn’t optimal, but might it be a workaround?
Have you tried it? That character displays fine on Gargoyle and the other interpreters I tested.
Gargoyle is weakest at Unicode (although how weak differs between Mac/Win/Linux). Other interpreters such as Spatterlight and WinGlulxe are entirely capable, as far as I can see.
Price is a kind of value. Dp 10.99 specifies a price with parts drachmas and leptons. A thing has a price. The price of a thing is usually Dp 0.00.
To say (p - price): say "[unicode 8367][drachmas part of p][unicode 46][leptons part of p]".
when play begins: let account be Dp 3.67; say account.
I hadn’t. I’ve had consistent enough trouble with Unicode that I was expecting ₯ to be a problem… but now I see it even works in my terminal emulator with git or glulx built with glktermw (with the terminal configured to use Noto Sans Mono).