Two questions...

Authoring Inform 7
1

  1. My game is now approaching 60,000 words. Will I get some kind of warning message or problem message when I reach that amount? And what do I need to do when I get there?

  2. When I use an Understand clause for alternate names for a scenery item, is that scenery item the only thing that will be able to have those alternate names? For instance, if I have a scenery item called a ‘family scrapbook’ and I want the player to be able to refer to it as a ‘book’, a ‘scrapbook’ or a ‘scrap book’, so I use some Understand clauses. Of course, I might want to create other, takeable, books in the game. Would that family scrapbook be the only thing in the game that can have the name ‘book’, or, in the absence of the scrapbook, would the player be able to use simply ‘book’ to refer to any of the other books, even though I used it in an Understand clause?

Thanks.

2

If you encounter a problem message about raising a compiler memory limit, do what the error says.

An Understand declaration for an object adds synonyms. You can use a word as a synonym in as many objects as you want; you get the usual parser disambiguation.

3

The thing to be wary of if you are going to have several of something in a game is to make sure they have unique adjectives for disambiguation. In fact, it’s best to avoid naming anything with a bare noun unless you’re defining a kind. “A clown is a kind of thing…”

If you make something called “clown” and another thing called “scary clown” and they are ever both in scope, the player will not be able to act on the plain “clown”. The parser will ask “Do you mean the clown or the scary clown?” to which the player can only reply “clown”, which will prompt the parser to ask again.

With regard to synonyms, the parser will ask about the object name.

To elaborate on Zarf’s note above, the compiler will stop and say something about exceeding available memory of some kind. The tricky part is the error message has an example message which often confuses people because that may not be the actual limit the compiler hit. You need to click on the “Console” tab away from the “Report” tab an unsuccessful compile usually lands on and read the output. It will tell you what limit you’ve exceeded such as MAX_PROP_TABLE_SIZE and what it’s set at. Then you go to the beginning of your source and add in “Use MAX_PROP_TABLE_SIZE of ######[some number higher than what it failed at]”

4

Thank you both!