§3.7. Properties depend on kind
Properties depend very much on kind. It makes no sense to ask whether a room is transparent or opaque, for instance, so Inform will not allow this either to be specified or queried.
Another way that kind influences properties can be seen from an earlier example:
The Gazebo is a room. A billiards table is in the Gazebo. On it is a trophy cup. A starting pistol is in the cup.
The cup, the pistol and the table are all allowed to have the "fixed in place" property, but in fact only the table actually has it: the cup and the pistol are created as "portable" instead. This is because Inform knows that most things are portable, but that supporters - such as the table - are usually fixed in place. If this assumption is wrong, we need only add the line:
The table is portable.
To begin with the title: There are many Disenchantment Bays across the world, named by eighteenth-century ships' captains - one in Antarctica, another in Tasmania, for instance. The most famous is probably the one where Lewis and Clark's expedition broke through to the Pacific. But ours is the one in Alaska, named in 1791 by a Spanish navigator who had hoped it might lead to the fabled Northwest Passage, and all of this history is beside the point since the game is set in the present day.
We might want to start with the glass case.
Now Inform will have guessed that the case is a container, but its default idea of a container is something like a bucket: permanently open and not able to be opened and shut. We can change that:
We get a similar set of guesses if we write
Using "some" rather than "a" or "the" tells Inform that the cushions are to be referred to as a plural object in the future. And because of the "on the bench..." phrase, Inform will guess that the bench is a supporter and that it is fixed in place and cannot be moved from room to room. We do have to tell it that the bench can be sat on, though:
And now a short script, so that if we type TEST ME, we experiment with the case and bench:
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To begin with the title: There are many Disenchantment Bays across the world, named by eighteenth-century ships' captains - one in Antarctica, another in Tasmania, for instance. The most famous is probably the one where Lewis and Clark's expedition broke through to the Pacific. But ours is the one in Alaska, named in 1791 by a Spanish navigator who had hoped it might lead to the fabled Northwest Passage, and all of this history is beside the point since the game is set in the present day.
We might want to start with the glass case.
Now Inform will have guessed that the case is a container, but its default idea of a container is something like a bucket: permanently open and not able to be opened and shut. We can change that:
We get a similar set of guesses if we write
Using "some" rather than "a" or "the" tells Inform that the cushions are to be referred to as a plural object in the future. And because of the "on the bench..." phrase, Inform will guess that the bench is a supporter and that it is fixed in place and cannot be moved from room to room. We do have to tell it that the bench can be sat on, though:
And now a short script, so that if we type TEST ME, we experiment with the case and bench:
To begin with the title: There are many Disenchantment Bays across the world, named by eighteenth-century ships' captains - one in Antarctica, another in Tasmania, for instance. The most famous is probably the one where Lewis and Clark's expedition broke through to the Pacific. But ours is the one in Alaska, named in 1791 by a Spanish navigator who had hoped it might lead to the fabled Northwest Passage, and all of this history is beside the point since the game is set in the present day.
We might want to start with the glass case.
Now Inform will have guessed that the case is a container, but its default idea of a container is something like a bucket: permanently open and not able to be opened and shut. We can change that:
We get a similar set of guesses if we write
Using "some" rather than "a" or "the" tells Inform that the cushions are to be referred to as a plural object in the future. And because of the "on the bench..." phrase, Inform will guess that the bench is a supporter and that it is fixed in place and cannot be moved from room to room. We do have to tell it that the bench can be sat on, though:
And now a short script, so that if we type TEST ME, we experiment with the case and bench:
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