Chapter 2: Adaptive Prose
§2.1. Varying What Is Written; §2.2. Varying What Is Read; §2.3. Using the Player's Input
![]() | Contents of The Inform Recipe Book |
![]() | Chapter 1: How to Use The Recipe Book |
![]() | Chapter 3: Place |
![]() | Indexes of the examples |
§2.1. Varying What Is Written
Before getting to actual recipes, many recipe books begin with intimidating lists of high-end kitchen equipment (carbon-steel pans, a high-temperature range, a Provencal shallot-grater, a set of six pomegranate juicers): fortunately, readers who have downloaded Inform already have the complete kitchen used by the authors. But the other traditional preliminaries, about universal skills such as chopping vegetables, boiling water and measuring quantities, do have an equivalent.
For us, the most basic technique of IF is to craft the text so that it smoothly and elegantly adapts to describe the situation, disguising the machine which is never far beneath the surface. This means using text substitutions so that any response likely to be seen more than once or twice will vary.
M. Melmoth's Duel demonstrates three basic techniques: an ever-changing random variation, a random variation changing only after the player has been absent for a while, and a message tweaked to add an extra comment in one special case. (Random choices can be quite specifically constrained, as Ahem shows in passing.) Fifty Ways to Leave Your Larva and Fifty Times Fifty Ways show how a generic message can be given a tweak to make it a better fit for the person it currently talks about. Curare picks out an item carried by the player to work into a message, trying to make an apt rather than random choice. Straw Into Gold demonstrates how to have Inform parrot back the player's choice of name for an object.
Another reason to vary messages is to avoid unnatural phrasing. Ballpark turns needlessly precise numbers - another computerish trait - into more idiomatic English. (Likewise Numberless, though it is really an example demonstrating how to split behaviour into many cases.) Prolegomena shows how to use these vaguer quantifiers any time Inform describes a group of objects (as in "You can see 27 paper clips here.").
Blink, a short but demanding example from the extreme end of Writing with Inform, shows how the basic text variation mechanisms of Inform can themselves be extended. Blackout demonstrates text manipulation at a lower level, replacing every letter of a room name with "*" when the player is in darkness.
Inform's included extension Complex Listing allows us more control over the order and presentation of lists of items.
For how to change printed text to upper, lower, sentence, or title casing, see Rocket Man.
![]() | Start of Chapter 2: Adaptive Prose |
![]() | Back to Chapter 1: How to Use The Recipe Book: §1.4. Information Only |
![]() | Onward to §2.2. Varying What Is Read |
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The actual number chosen in this definition is pretty much irrelevant: the main thing is that we want to establish relative values. The lower the "last use" number of an item, the older that item should be understood to be, as we see here:
This phrase will select, from the collection of objects passed to it, the one that has been mentioned least recently. This means that if we consult it repeatedly about the same collection, it will begin to cycle predictably; but if new items are added to the collection, it will mention these first before returning to the previous cycle. Now we can use this:
We could have said "You stare morosely at [the oldest thing carried by the player]" here, but doing so would not have set the "last use" property correctly, so we would not get the cycling behavior that we're looking for.
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The actual number chosen in this definition is pretty much irrelevant: the main thing is that we want to establish relative values. The lower the "last use" number of an item, the older that item should be understood to be, as we see here:
This phrase will select, from the collection of objects passed to it, the one that has been mentioned least recently. This means that if we consult it repeatedly about the same collection, it will begin to cycle predictably; but if new items are added to the collection, it will mention these first before returning to the previous cycle. Now we can use this:
We could have said "You stare morosely at [the oldest thing carried by the player]" here, but doing so would not have set the "last use" property correctly, so we would not get the cycling behavior that we're looking for.
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