Table of Contents | Actors > Changing the Player Character
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Changing the Player Character

Many, perhaps most, works of Interactive Fiction stick to the same player character throughout. There are some games, however, in which the player character changes to another character during the course of the game, perhaps more than once, or perhaps swapping between two or more characters.

If the various characters never met, that is, none of the player characters never functioned as an NPC and were never in scope while the player was playing as another character, then changing from one player character to another would be almost as simple as setting gPlayerChar to the new player character and letting the player know what had happened. Where, however, the same Actor object may function as the player character at one point in the game and an NPC at another point, it becomes more complicated.

In this case we need to call setPlayer(actor), where actor is the Actor object we want to become the new player character. This will become the actor from whose perspective the game is played from then one, and the one referred to by the parser as ‘you’. If we want our new player character to be referred to in the first or third person, we have to supply setPlayer() with a second parameter, 1 or 3 respectively, for example setPlayer(bob, 1) to make bob the new player character referred to as ‘I’ or ‘me’.

If we do this we probably also want to let the player know what’s just happened. To assist with this setPlayer() returns the previous name of the new player character, so when the player becomes Bob you could use code like this:

     "You are now <<setPlayer(bob)>>. ";
     bob.getOutermostRoom.lookAroundWithin(); 
     

Something else you can do to help players keep track of who they’re now meant to be is to include the name of the player character in the status line. One way to do that might be to include it in parentheses after the room name, which we can do like this:

     modify Room
        statusName(actor)
        {
            inherited(actor);
            if(libGlobal.playerCharName != nil)
                " (as <<libGlobal.playerCharName>>) ";
        }
    ;
     

Or, alternatively, if we prefer it:

     
    modify statusLine
        showStatusLeft()
        {
            inherited;
            if(libGlobal.playerCharName != nil)
                " [as <<libGlobal.playerCharName>>] ";
        }
    ; 

Or again, if we didn’t want the score and turn count at the right hand end of the status line we could do this:

    modify statusLine
        showStatusRight()
        {        
            if(libGlobal.playerCharName != nil)
                " [as <<libGlobal.playerCharName>>] ";
        }
    ;

You can use whichever of these you prefer, or devise your own variant.

Note the use of libGlobal.**playerCharName** here. This is set by setPlayer(), so that if we’ve never called setPlayer() it will be nil (unless, of course, we set it ourselves, which we might want to do at the start of the game). We need it because we can’t just use gPlayerChar.theName to get at the player characters’s name, since unless it’s a third-person player character that would just be ‘I’ or ‘you’ (which is not very informative).

Another thing to bear in mind is that if the same object is going to act as the player character at one time and an NPC at another, it should be defined as being of class Actor; the player character can be of class Thing, but this wouldn’t be appropriate for an NPC. Again, when you’re defining an actual or potential player character who might also become an NPC at some point, you should define it more or less as if it was an NPC, except for the person property which may be 1 or 2 if this is the Actor that’s starting out as the player character; for example:

     
    + joan: Actor 'Joan; large; woman; her'
        "She's quite a large woman. "
        
        person =  2
    ;

One more point: the description you want in response to X ME when Joan is the player character will probably be a bit different from the description you want in response to X ME when Joan is an NPC. You can test for which is applicable using the isPlayerChar property of the Actor and write the desc property accordingly. A minimally varying one might look like this:

     
    + joan: Actor 'Joan; large; woman; her'
        "<<if isPlayerChar>>You're<<else>>She's<<end>> quite a large woman. "
        
        person =  2
    ;

In practice, you’d probably want to vary the two descriptions by more than this.

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Table of Contents | Actors > Changing the Player Character
Prev: NPC-Initiated Conversation     Next: Final Moves