Alright. Is it just me or is there some sort of specific method for developing the world? (I’m just frustrated cause I’m getting wierd reactions from I7 all of a sudden) I mean, I have a pile of leaves in the middle of the forest, and I described the pile of leaves as “lying on the ground is a pile of leaves”. However, when I run the game, I get “Lying on the ground is a pile of leaves” followed a paragraph later by “There is a pile of leaves here”. I have had this problem many times and have never found a solution for it, outside of just starting my code over from scratch, but this takes forever when you are 20+ rooms in size.
Has anyone else had wierd issues like this? Or how about, the description for room 1 is “blah blah” followed a paragraph later by the description of the pile of leaves is “blah blah” and then you go to compile and it tells you that the description for room 1 is blah blah and cannot be overriden by the description of the pile of leaves which are in room 1? I don’t know if this makes any sense to anyone else, but it sure the heck don’t make no sense to me.
It’s hard to say what’s going wrong without seeing your code, or at least having more information. A couple of things that I can think of, off the top of my head: Do you create the pile of leaves by using the phrase “called a pile of leaves”, e.g. “A thing called a pile of leaves in the Forest”? If you do, and if you have already referred to the pile of leaves earlier in your code, then Inform might be creating two piles of leaves. Do you have any “for writing a paragraph about” rules (or any other rules that control whether the pile of leaves is mentioned)? If you do, then something might going wrong there. Apart from that, I can’t really say. Maybe someone else - with more experience with I7 than I have - has some more ideas.
Can you come up with a minimal test case that exhibits this behaviour? It sounds like you can’t, but that would definitely help.
Alright. Here’s another tidbit of confusion for me. My world map. I have a rather large forest, a house and the front of the house is somehow mixed up with one of my forest rooms. Until I try to link to this forest room, everything is fine. As soon as I link and compile, my Front of House room disappears and gets overwritten by my Forest 9 room. The forest 9 room shouldn’t even be near the house, yet it is totally taking over the front of the house. Has anyone experienced this or even understand what I’m trying to say? Lemme try and get it to copy again so I can paste in here.
The map that Inform creates in the Index will quite likely turn into a weird mess as you start adding rooms. Search for the phrase “index map” in the Documentation, and you’ll see some ways of getting the map to look better.
However, this should not affect game-play. The way you’ve written your post, it’s not 100% clear whether you’re just talking about the map getting messed up, or whether you’re talking about a room actually disappearing from the model world (so that the player can’t visit that room). Can you be more specific about the problem you’re having?
The inform index map gets easily confused. Section 22.17 tells you how to give the index map explicit instructions to display properly.
However, the index map doesn’t affect gameplay. If your code says that room F6 is east of room FP, then that’s where it is in your game. Inform can’t figure out how to draw it properly, is all.
If you want help with the problem in your original post, you’re going to have to post some actual code.
Hehe. Sorry 'bout that. It just kinda all ran into one single thought process that day. Anyway, thank you for the information about I7 getting confused when drawing up maps. I’ve started tinkering with the Index Map and the EPS file that it makes. Would anyone happen to know of a free eps to bmp converter or something else free for working with EPS files? I can’t get Acrobat to read 'em, even though they are listed as a sub-class of PDF. All I have right now if PDFFly and my demo time is beginning to run short. Down to 23 days now.
Thanks much for any help and suggestions and ideas.
Isn’t this that deal where you need to write something like (not tested – coming from memory):
Rule for writing a paragraph about the pile of leaves: now the pile of leaves is mentioned.
That stops Inform from writing it, usually because you want to mention it yourself in a description.
Warning, though: Don’t put “lying on the ground is a pile of leaves” in the description of the room, ground, or leaves, if the pile of leaves can be taken or will later blow away. Then the player will still get the description that it’s there after it’s gone.
You can do something like (again not tested):
The description of the forest is “[if the pile of leaves is in the forest]There is a pile of leaves on the ground.[otherwise]It’s just an ordinary forest.[end if]”
OK, yeah, I am late to the party. Curse me out later. I just did a little experiment with the entire “pile of leaves” thing since it didn’t seem to have a resolution in this thread.
I can duplicate the problem of having the pile mentioned twice in two separate paragraphs with the following code:
[code]The Forest is a room. The description of the Forest is “There is a pile of leaves here.”
There is a pile of leaves in the forest. The description is “The leaves just sit there in a pile, begging for a jump from a toddler to make a mess of it once again.”[/code]
Yes I have kids and have gone through this circus a time or two…
Anyway, the output at that point in the Game tab is:
To get the bit about the kids, you have to x the pile. To get this annoyance to go away, you have to use a scenery declaration. Changing the pertinant code to:
There is a pile of leaves in the forest. The pile is scenery. The description is......
Just thought I would put that here since I had much the same problem for a while…=]
Bloodsong, unless you don’t want the pile of leaves to be scenery, because maybe you’re going to move them or maybe you want them to be a container so you can hide something in them or whatever.
All you have to do is ask Inform not to mention them, no matter what kind of thing they are:
Rule for writing a paragraph about the pile of leaves: now the pile of leaves is mentioned.
