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Entering the Cottage

Having players try to listen to the bird isn’t the only accident waiting to happen in this game. Now consider a transcript that starts off like this:

In front of a Cottage
You stand outside a cottage. The forest stretches east. 

>in
You can’t go that way. From here you could go east.

Since Heidi starts the game standing outside what may be her very own cottage, this hardly seems an appropriate response. We need to provide a more plausible reason why Heidi can’t enter her cottage. Here’s one way to do it:

    beforeCottage: Room 'In front of a Cottage'
        "You stand outside a cottage. The forest stretches east. "
        
        east = forest
        in = 'It\'s such a lovely day -- much too nice to go inside. '
    ;

Previously we only attached rooms to direction properties, but we can attach all sorts of other things as well. If, as here, we define a direction property as a string (single or double quoted) an attempt to move in that direction will just cause the string to be displayed to the player. This is useful in cases such as this where we want to provide a non-default message explaining why travel in a given direction isn’t allowed.

While we’re at it we could also change the default refusal message to something a bit less generic than “You can’t go that way.” One way to do that is to override cannotGoThatWayMsg on Room:

    modify Room
        cannotGoThatWayMsg = 'Better stick to the path. '
    ;

Then we’d see something like:

In front of a Cottage
You stand outside a cottage. The forest stretches east. 

>n
Better stick to the path. From here you could go east.

Note how overriding cannotGoThatWayMsg thus changed the first part of the refusal message (“You can’t go that way” becomes “Better stick to the path”) but leaves the second part (“From here you could go east”) intact. If we wanted to change the entire message we would need to override the method cannotGoThatWay(dir). This might be the appropriate thing to do at the top of the tree, where being told “Better stick to the path” is hardly appropriate:

    topOfTree: Room 'At the top of the tree'
        "You cling precariously to the trunk. "
        
        down = clearing
        
        cannotGoThatWay(dir)
        {
            "The only way from here is down. ";
        }
    ;

But even with all these changes we’re not out of the woods yet, since if players attempt to EXAMINE THE COTTAGE or ENTER THE COTTAGE, they’ll be told that no such thing exists, even though it’s plainly mentioned in the room description. It’s easy enough to add a cottage object; just add the following object definition immediately after the definition of the beforeCottage room:

    + cottage: Thing 'tiny cottage;small simple; house home'
        "It's small and simple, but you're very happy here. "
        
        isFixed = true
    ;

This only does half the job, though:

In front of a Cottage
You stand outside a cottage. The forest stretches east. 

>x cottage
It’s small and simple, but you’re very happy here. 

>enter cottage
The tiny cottage is not something you can enter. 

We can fix this by overriding the cannotEnterMsg property of the cottage:

    + cottage: Thing 'tiny cottage;small simple; house home'
        "It's small and simple, but you're very happy here. "
        
        isFixed = true
        
        cannotEnterMsg = 'It\'s such a lovely day -- much too nice to go inside. '
    ;

This works, but now we’ve defined exactly the same response twice, once on the cottage and once on the beforeCottage location. This seems a bit of a nuisance at best, and could be even more of a nuisance if we decided we wanted to change this message, since we’d now have to remember to change it in two places. One solution would be simply to have the cannotEnterMsg property of the cottage take its value from the in property of beforeCottage:

    + cottage: Thing 'tiny cottage;small simple; house home'
        "It's small and simple, but you're very happy here. "
        
        isFixed = true
        
        cannotEnterMsg = location.in
    ;

You may have noticed that the property for the message explaining the refusal to allow Heidi to enter the cottage is called cannotEnterMsg. The adv3lite library tries to follow this pattern consistenly, so that when an Xxxx action is refused, the corresponding message property is called cannotXxxxMsg. Of course this only helps if you know the name of the action. For the example the commands GET COTTAGE, TAKE COTTAGE and PICK UP cottage would all result in the Take action, so to respond to any of them with something a bit less bland than the standard “The tiny cottage is fixed in place” you’d need to override cannotTakeMsg. Taking the trouble to do this kind of thing is often worth it, since it helps lend a bit of character to your game when you refuse impossible or unimplemented actions with customized messages. In this case of the cottage, for example, you could write:

    + cottage: Thing 'tiny cottage;small simple; house home'
        "It's small and simple, but you're very happy here. "
        
        isFixed = true
        
        cannotEnterMsg = location.in
        cannotTakeMsg = 'You\'re not a tortoise; you can\'t carry your home with
            you. '
    ;

I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to add an appropriate cannotTakeMsg to the tree and the branch. You may also like to define some additional objects to implement other items that are mentioned in room descriptions but not actually implemented.

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Table of Contents | Heidi Revisited > Entering the Cottage
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