Writing in Inform

WI §8.1. Change of values that vary

So far, what we have done in response to the player's commands amounts to little more than a few ripostes. The simulated world does change during play, as the player moves from room to room or picks up things, but all of this is happening automatically, not at our direct instruction. How then can we make the world change?

Recall that the world consists of rooms, in which are things, and that all of these have properties appropriate to their kinds. Some properties are either/or ("open" or "closed" but not both and not neither), while others have values (the "matching key" of a lockable door, for instance). Finally, we may also have created some free-standing values or "variables".

We take the last example first, as it is the simplest. Suppose we have:

The new phrase here is "now". This automatically checks that the new value is one which makes sense in the given context, so for instance it would not allow either of these:

the former being a number, and the latter a room, so that neither is a direction. Similarly, "now" will not allow constant values to be changed. So

...will result in a problem message; it's like writing "now 1 is 2". The difference between "the prevailing wind" and "blue" is that the wind was declared to be a "direction that varies", whereas blue wasn't.

WI §8.2. Changing the command prompt

The command prompt is the text printed by Inform to ask the player for another command. Ordinarily this is simply a greater-than-sign, ">", so we tend not to notice it as text at all. Internally, though, it is a variable value called "command prompt", which means we can change it.

For example, this will be a more conversational sort of prompt:

Whereas this will be more up-to-the-minute and demanding:

("Time of day" is another variable value, which is fairly self-explanatory, but will be covered in detail later on.) The prompt can be changed at any point, so can be used to indicate the current situation, or even as a sly way to introduce a sort of conversation between computer and player.

WI §8.3. Changing the status line

The status line is the black bar along the top of a story being played, which ordinarily displays the current position; in a story with scoring, it also usually shows the score and number of moves taken. Like the command prompt, it is not fixed but results from values which can be changed: the "left hand status line" and "right hand status line".

The default values are "[the player's surroundings]" for the left hand status line and "[score]/[turn count]" for the right hand status line (if there's scoring; it's blank otherwise). Score and turn count are numbers which vary in play (more about scoring later); "[the player's surroundings]" is a text substitution really intended for just this purpose:

These make useful elements to juggle in redesigning the status line, as in the following example:

The text in the right hand status line should be kept no more than 14 letters long, including any spaces. The left hand status line has more leeway, but should still be kept brief.

WI §8.4. Change of either/or properties

When we have an either/or property, we can set it like so:

If it is open already, nothing changes: in any case nothing is said to the player unless we give explicit instructions to that effect, as we've done here.

Inform protects its model world from accidental damage in several ways, one of which is to ensure that things are not given properties which they are not allowed to have. So this, for instance, will not be accepted:

More subtle problems arise if it is not possible to tell, when the story is being constructed, what the object in question will be: for instance, if we try to change a randomly chosen object to be "unvisited". Inform therefore makes additional checks during play, printing up a suitable message only if the rules are violated. The net effect is that it is impossible for the oaken door ever to have the "unvisited" property.

WI §8.5. Change of properties with values

Changing properties with values is very similar:

Inform checks three different things to ensure that this change is safe to perform. Firstly, the value must be the right kind for the property in question, so this for instance would be rejected:

Secondly, the object in question has to be allowed to have the given property. This, for instance, would be disallowed:

(since "initial appearance" is a property which only things can have, not rooms). Finally, the object has to actually have the property, not just have the right to have that property. Thus:

...is only permitted if the Closet is designed with a "printed name". In fact this is certain to be true: all rooms and things automatically have a printed name, which is the short boldface description in the case of rooms, and the usual text briefly describing something in the case of things.

"Now" is a simple way to change many things in Inform, but it's cumbersome to change the map of the model world using "now", because the map is such a complicated arrangement. (It's not a property: it's a sort of mesh of relations.) So a special phrase exists to change map connections:

Altering the map itself is not a very subtle way to adjust when and where the player can move - writing suitable rules is usually a cleaner solution - so this phrase is best avoided unless really needed.

WI §8.6. Whose property?

This seems a useful point to clarify something already seen. We normally call a property with a value something like:

We are sometimes allowed to omit the "of the ..." part, and simply call it "the printed name", for the sake of brevity. For instance, the following room description:

will result in "West Ballroom" being substituted for "[printed name]". Since the text belongs to the West Ballroom, that is assumed to be the owner of any properties named in its description. Similarly:

Here the owner of the "printed name" is assumed to be the noun referred to in the action - in other words, the "something" alluded to in the rule.

WI §8.7. Moving things

We have now seen how to change the properties of rooms and things, and also any freestanding values which may have a bearing on the model world. We are not allowed to change the kind of anything during play. Our remaining freedom is to move things around. It would make no sense to move rooms around, because rooms are the fixed reference points in our geography, but anything else is mobile. This even includes things which are supposedly "fixed in place", for unlike the player, we have god-like powers. (There are minor restrictions: backdrops are trickier to move, since they are present in several rooms at once - see the next section. And doors, at the junction between two rooms, cannot be moved.)

Here is how to move something:

If the destination is a person, like so:

then it will be carried rather than worn. We could arrange for it to be worn instead by writing

"Now..." is a much more flexible phrase than "move": more on this shortly.

WI §8.8. Moving backdrops

A backdrop can be in several rooms at once. When created, its position can be given as any specific collection of rooms, or as a region, or even as "everywhere". For instance:

Moving backdrops is not like moving other things, because there's no single destination. There are several possibilities:

(a) A backdrop can be moved to a region. If we define:

then we can write either of

and either way, the stream is now found in the Rock Pool and the Ledge but nowhere else.

(b) A backdrop can be moved to a category of rooms:

What then happens is that the stream is present in whichever rooms are currently wet. But the stream's position is ordinarily checked only after movements, for efficiency's sake. So if the player is in a room which suddenly changes from being dry to being wet, the stream will not magically appear (though it will be there if the player goes out and comes in again). If this is not good enough, the phrase "update backdrop positions" can be used to ensure the accuracy of all backdrop locations after a dramatic change:

(c) A backdrop can be moved to be either everywhere or nowhere:

WI §8.9. Moving the player

The player is a thing, too, and can also be moved, which has the effect of instantaneous transportation, without the need for a suitable map connection to the new location. For instance, these are equivalent:

This will ordinarily result in a room description of the Bodleian Library being printed up, but that might not always be desirable. For instance:

Thus tacking on the option "without printing a room description", remembering to add the comma, omits the description which would otherwise be produced. A compromise is to use the option "printing an abbreviated room description": this gives a full description if the player has never been here before, but only a brief one if it is a familiar scene.

The player's point of view can also be moved by shifting to another character. Suppose the story features two people, Alice and Bob, and the player at the keyboard is giving commands to Alice, and seeing everything from her point of view. The phrase:

switches the perspective so that now Bob is the one controlled by the human player, and it's Bob's point of view which counts. The human being at the keyboard may feel a sense of having jumped abruptly from place to place, but in fact neither Alice nor Bob has moved.

A change of player can sometimes cause confusing things to happen, if it takes place as part of a successful action. Suppose there's an action called "possessing", which enables the player to possess somebody else's body; and suppose the player types POSSESS ADELE. The action succeeds, so that the player moves into the mind of Adele. But that means that at the end of the action, the player is no longer the actor - that is, no longer the person who began the action; and consequently, Inform won't use the report rulebook to say what has just happened. It's a strange business, moving into another body.

WI §8.10. Removing things from play

Some things will occasionally be in a limbo state called being "off-stage": like actors or props not needed in Act II, but perhaps to be brought back on-stage later, they wait on the sidelines. Anything created with no apparent location will start the story off-stage, as in the case of the lamp here:

(Such things are easy to see in the World index because they are listed after all of the rooms and their contents, not belonging inside any room.) If we wanted to make this clearer to a human reader, we could add:

to emphasise the point. In this context, "nowhere" means "in no room". Moving the lamp onto the stage-set, so to speak, is easy:

or perhaps:

and we can whisk it away again like so:

(We can't say "now the lamp is somewhere" because that's too vague about exactly where it is.) In older builds of Inform, the usual thing was to write "remove the lamp from play", but that's now a deprecated phrase: better to use "nowhere" instead.

We can test whether something is on-stage or off-stage with:

Inform also understands two adjectives for this:

Because these are adjectives, they can be used in a few ways which "nowhere" and "somewhere" can't, such as:

Note that "on-stage" and "off-stage" apply only to things. Rooms, directions and regions are the stage itself: so it makes no sense to ask the question of whether they are "on-" or "off-". Doors are always on-stage; a backdrop, say "the sky", is always on-stage unless it has been taken off by writing something like "now the sky is nowhere".

WI §8.11. Now...

"Now" has already appeared several times in this chapter, being used like a Swiss army knife to change values of all kinds:

In fact, "now" is by far the most flexible phrase known to Inform.

We've now seen all three things which can be done with a condition S which describes the world:

For instance,

WI §8.12. Increasing and decreasing

Once we begin to deal with named values (or table entries, list entries or other ways to describe places where values are kept), we find that we often want to change them. We could if we wanted always use "now" for this, but it can be a little clumsily worded if we want to increase or decrease something:

Because of that, we have some convenient abbreviations which have the advantage that the value being changed only has to be named once:

An even greater abbreviation can be made when we are changing a number by 1 either way:

"Increment" and "decrement" are traditional computing terms, though they have been used in engineering for at least a century and in finance for longer still.

WI §8.13. Checking on whereabouts

We have seen that while rooms are fixed, their contents move around, so we will need ways to examine the current whereabouts of things. The following examples show the kind of conditions allowed:

These are exactly like the assertions which we use to set up the world, except that we make them questions by placing "if" in front. But we shall later see that we can also use three other tenses, not to mention plural forms, so that new verbal forms like "had not been inside" and "were not supported by" are legal here (which they would not be in assertions). What we are not allowed is to contract these verbs with apostrophes: "isn't", "hasn't" and "hadn't" are forbidden.

Overwhelmingly the condition we check most is whether the player is carrying something. The following are therefore equivalent:

And similarly for "not carried", "worn" and "not worn". To be precise, if a form of to be carried or to be worn is not followed by any other description, then "the player" is assumed to be doing the carrying or wearing.

WI §8.14. More flexible descriptions of whereabouts

The examples just given were all basically of the form "X relation Y" where X and Y were specific names of things. For example,

Just as actions could be described with patterns to be matched ("taking an open container", say), so can the positions of things. Giving subtler descriptions of our X and Y sometimes broadens the possibilities, sometimes narrows them:

In the first case, Y is allowed to be one of a whole range of things - any of the women existing in the world. This makes for a broader condition. In the second case, Y has not only to be the cupboard, but at a time when it is closed: which makes for a narrower condition. We can, of course, also vary X:

And we can even vary both X and Y at once:

a condition which will be true if, anywhere in the story's world, any woman is holding any animal.

WI §8.15. Calling names

Conditions like "if somebody is in an adjacent room" allow complicated tests to be performed with a minimum of fuss, but it's rare that we want to know only whether they are true: more likely we also want to know which person, and which room.

For this purpose, we are allowed to supply a name for any such vaguely-described object which comes up, and then to use that name thereafter.

We can even name more than one of the things discovered:

Note the brackets, which are essential. The result of typing "wait" is then

Of course, that might be just one of many animals held by women in the story. We shall later see ways to go through all of the possibilities found, performing some action with each in turn.

A calling, if we can use that word, should be made immediately after the noun it refers to, and not left to hang back after any relative clauses. For instance,

is allowed, but not

because there is too much potential ambiguity - are we trying to call the player something?

WI §8.16. Counting the number of things

It is very often useful to know how many things are in a given situation, and for this purpose we have the "number of ..." construction. For instance:

Whereas "a woman is holding an animal" makes the same test as "an animal is held by a woman", getting the same result, counting is not so even-handed:

are different questions and, unless the ration is strictly one lapdog per baroness, will have different answers. If Cruella de Vil has 101 dalmatians, they may be very different indeed.

It can also be helpful to count things with no particular location, like so:

For instance:

Provided that the possible range is finite, we can also use "number of" to count values which match a description. For instance:

or if we were to define

then "the number of colours" would evaluate to 7. As with other ways of talking about whole ranges of values, this only works if the range is manageable. "The number of numbers" cannot sensibly be worked out: there are infinitely many, for all practical purposes, and similarly for "the number of texts".

WI §8.17. Looking at containment by hand

The descriptions outlined in the last few sections are intended to deal with almost all of the routine questions we might have about what currently resides where. It should be a last resort to use the following more primitive way to inspect the world.

It's sometimes useful to go the other way. When something has possessions, we can find them out one at a time by running through a list.

WI §8.18. Randomness

Sometimes we want to introduce random behaviour into play. We usually do this by generating random values, and then acting differently depending on what they are. The following:

produces, as it suggests, a random number drawn from the choices 2, 3, 4 or 5, each of which is equally likely to come up. In fact, this isn't limited to numbers:

We can also use random conditions:

Testing IF which makes random choices can be rather frustrating, because a problem showing up on one attempt may not show up on another. We can get around this by making use of the fact that computers do not actually generate true randomness, but instead make a sequence of apparently random numbers by applying a complicated formula to each one in order to make the next. The starting point is a number called the "seed", because the next choice grows out of it.

Alternatively, it's possible the "fix" the RNG by clicking the "Make random outcomes predictable when testing" option on the Settings panel. This makes the behaviour predictable whenever the story is played within Inform, but (unlike the rule above) has no effect on the story file once released.

WI §8.19. Random choices of things

Writing "a random number" is not allowed, because the possible range is too large, but that was the only reason why not.

For instance:

But it's important to worry about the possibility that nothing qualifies - here, that no adjacent rooms exist. The above would then say: