8. Vehicles, Animals and Furniture

The vehicle kind in Inform refers to an object which can carry at least one person, but is small enough to fit into a single location:

We can then apply different rules to a player going somewhere on foot or in the vehicle. Peugeot ★ (a bicycle) is an easy example; No Relation ★ (a car) adds an ignition switch to the vehicle; Straw Boater ★★ (a motorboat) gets around areas of lake where travel on foot is not just slower but impossible.

Hover ★★★ (a sci-fi "hover-bubble") changes the appearance of the landscape when it is seen from inside the vehicle.

This section covers vehicles whose interior consists of at least one entire room. Moving into this room constitutes boarding: there is then some pause while it travels: moving out again disembarks at a different location. The only complication arising is how the player controls the journey (by talking to someone? by pressing buttons? by steering?).

The Unbuttoned Elevator Affair ★ provides the simplest possible whole-room vehicle, which ferries between two fixed points. If you are at one of these, it must be the other one you want to get to, so there is no need for controls.

Dubai ★★★ is a much more elaborate elevator, with many possible destinations, chosen using buttons inside the elevator.

Empire ★★ simulates a train journey. Here there are no controls as such, but the train passes through a sequence of stops spaced apart in time, so the player chooses an exit by getting out at the right moment.

On a very large, slowish craft such as a cruise liner, we are not so much travelling in a vehicle: it's more as if we are visiting a whole building, which becomes our world for the (probably long) duration of the journey. The liner steers around in long, slow curves, changing its orientation in the water, so that (if we think of "north" as a strictly magnetic matter, anyway) north is constantly rotating: something we don't notice on board because our own reference points, provided by the ship itself, stay fixed relative to ourselves. Because of this, some ships in IF are navigated using FORE, AFT, PORT and STARBOARD directions rather than NORTH, EAST, SOUTH and WEST: see Fore ★★★.

Animals exhibit a wide range of behaviour: much of the chapter on Other Characters applies just as well to animals as to human beings, with the exception of the material on conversation. But two examples here, both fairly simple, show how a fairly convincing domestic pet can be achieved simply by reacting to certain events going on nearby: Feline Behavior ★ (a cat) and Today Tomorrow ★★ (a dog).

Fido ★ provides a dog which the player can re-name at will.

For animals that we can sit on and ride - a camel or a horse, say - we may want to use the Rideable Vehicles extension by Graham Nelson, which also provides a rideable animal kind.

Most domestic furniture consists of supporters and containers of one size or another. This means that the simplest furniture needs no elaborate instructions:

The examples below are therefore mostly ways to get around the usual restrictions on containers (that they only have one interior) and supporters (that they cannot simultaneously be containers as well).

Yolk of Gold ★★ provides a set of drawers, that is, a container with multiple interiors.

U-Stor-It ★★★ provides a way to have containers with a lid which is also a supporter.

Swigmore ★★ provides a supporter which holds up the player, but has no top surface as such, and cannot hold up anything else. Kiwi ★ demonstrates a kind of high shelf, whose objects cannot be seen or used unless the player stands on a ladder.

Princess and the Pea ★ shows how a pile of supporters, each on top of the last, could be managed.

Tamed ★ demonstrates furniture large enough to get inside, or on top of.

Circle of Misery ★ demonstrates a conveyor belt, which can hold multiple items but only brings one of them within the player's reach at a time.

Before implementing elaborate mechanisms to handle plumbing, we should pause to ask ourselves: how much of this do we need? Is it really necessary to simulate the complete set of fixtures and fittings?

This turns out to be a little tricky to do, and also rather dull to set out. The example Modern Conveniences ★★ was actually written as a demonstration of how an extension to Inform might be written to provide a general "kitchens and bathrooms service" for writers, but it contains a nice implementation well worth borrowing. The idea is to provide a "kitchen" kind of room and a "bathroom" kind of room. All kitchens created automatically contain standard kitchen appliances: fridge, freezer, sink with taps, counters, cabinets, and a stovetop with built-in oven. Similarly, all bathrooms will have sinks, baths, cabinets, and toilets, and respond to some standard interactions.

Another common feature of bathrooms is a mirror: Versailles ★★ demonstrates how to create a simple one.