| 6.9. Going, Pushing Things in Directions |
It is very common for players to make a mistake and type the wrong direction command, or even to misunderstand the room description and not recognize all the possible exits. Bumping into Walls helpfully adds a facility so that when the player tries to go in the wrong direction, the game lists the correct possibilities, as in
From here, the viable exits are to the south, the east and the west.
Another useful technique is to provide some sense of the journey between locations, especially if they are remote from one another or the player has to do something unusual to get from one to the other. Up and Up adds a short description of travel when we approach a new room, before the room description is printed; Veronica, conversely, adds a comment when the player leaves a region of the map. The Second Oldest Problem intervenes and kills a player who tries to travel from one dark room to another. Mattress King embellishes the description that automatically results from PUSH MATTRESS WEST, adding a line that describes the player pushing the object before describing the new room approached.
We may also want to add a brief comment when we arrive in a new room, after the room description is printed. One trivial way to do this is to append the line to the room's main description, conditionally, like this:
The Hammock Emporium is a room. "This is Cousin Ed's shop, the big dream he left accounting to pursue. You can't help gawking at the Luxury Leather Space Hammock, made of genuine red buffalo skins[if unvisited]. [paragraph break]So this is why Grampa makes all those 'lying down on the job' jokes every Thanksgiving[end if].".
But often we want our first-glance comment to come after some items in the room are described; and for this effect, we would use the "first look rule" defined in Saint Eligius.
Another category of examples treat how we handle the movement commands themselves. The eight compass directions, with UP and DOWN, IN and OUT, are used as standard in most interactive fiction, but they are not the only possible way of navigating, and strike many newcomers to the genre as counter-intuitive, since when strolling around in real life most of us rarely think about our travel in terms of compass orientation. Misadventure allows the player to GO TO a named room, instead, and calculates the best route to reach the destination; Safari Guide builds on this by letting the player make the whole trip in a single move, automatically opening any doors that stand in his way en route.
In the same spirit of interpreting the player's intentions sensibly, Provenance Unknown modifies the pushing command so that if the player pushes the top object in a stack of objects towards a direction, Inform attempts to move the bottom item instead. This is convenient if, for instance, we have a heavy television on a movable cart and want PUSH TELEVISION WEST to work just as well as PUSH CART WEST. Zorb demonstrates adjusting the restrictions on when the player is allowed to push things in directions in the first place.
We also sometimes want to respond sensibly to terse movement commands or ones that rely on some knowledge of where the player has already been. Polarity provides a GO BACK command, allowing the player to retreat in the direction from which he came, while Minimal Movement understands LEAVE, GO, and so on as OUT, in the absence of other information. Owen's Law takes this further, calculating from the best routes on a map how to make OUT mean "move towards the exit of this indoor room", and IN mean "proceed further into the interior". Wonderland assigns altitudes to all rooms and works out the local best meaning of UP and DOWN accordingly.
Indirection renames the compass directions to correspond to primary colors, as in Mayan thinking. The World of Charles S. Roberts substitutes new ones, instead, introducing a hex-grid map in place of the usual one.
See Varying What Is Read for further divisions of the standard compass, such as north-northwest
See Ships, Trains and Elevators for ship-board directions
See Bicycles, Cars and Boats for common vehicles in which to travel the map
|  Example Up and Up Adding a short message as the player approaches a room, before the room description itself appears. | |
| Example Veronica An effect that occurs only when the player leaves a region entirely. | |
| Example Saint Eligius Adding a first look rule that comments on locations when we visit them for the first time, inserting text after objects are listed but before any "every turn" rules might occur. | |
| Example Misadventure A going by name command which does respect movement rules, and accepts names of rooms as commands. | |
|  Example Safari Guide The same functionality, but making the player continue to move until he reaches his destination or a barrier, handling all openable doors on the way. | |
| Example Minimal Movement Supplying a default direction for "go", so that "leave", "go", etc., are always interpreted as "out". | |
|  Example Wonderland Hiking Mount Rainier, with attention to which locations are higher and which lower than the present location. | |
| Example Indirection Renaming the directions of the compass so that "white" corresponds to north, "red" to east, "yellow" to south, and "black" to west. | |
Wargaming is an ancient pursuit, but its modern form began as a professional training exercise in 19th-century Prussian staff colleges; since at least as early as H. G. Wells's "Little Wars" (1913) it has been a hobby of "boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books." The free-form tabletop game used miniature figures and tape-measured movements, and remains the dominant form today. But in the mid-20th century, map grids on printed sheets gave the hobby a sudden new lease of life. They were easier to set up, more interesting to look at, cheaper to sell by mail-order. 1970s sales figures for "Strategy and Tactics", the leading US subscription-based wargame distributor, were very similar to those of Infocom's IF games in the 1980s. And like classical IF, the grid-based wargame parceled up a continuous world into locations.
Grids were initially square, as on a chessboard, but square cells have several disadvantages. Four directions of movement (N, E, S, W) is too few, yet allowing movement in the diagonal directions means allowing tanks to travel about 1.4 times faster northeast than they do north. Square grids also only conform cleanly to man-made landscape features such as buildings in one orientation, and they never fit hills well. (A compromise measure to fix this, cutting the squares into octagons to leave smaller diamond squares at corner intersections, has never caught on.)
But following Charles S. Roberts's American Civil War designs for Avalon Hill of 1958-61 (notably "Chancellorsville" and the second edition of "Gettysburg"), a hexagonal grid became the new standard. Each hexagon is the same distance from the centre of all six of its neighbours, which are at equal angular spacings; and clumps of hexagons fit the shape of lakes, contoured hills, and so forth, much more naturally than clumps of squares do. Hexes also have a certain mystique - an air of "I don't belong in the children's department".
But hexes are tricky for IF, not least because English lacks words for "the direction 60 degrees around from front". Our cognitive view of the world tends to be square, perhaps because our two eyes both face front, in a direction at right angles to the plane of our arms, legs, pelvis and eyes. We reach out sideways at right angles to our walking. Even early hex-grid wargames called the cells "squares", though "hexes" eventually caught on. Still and all:
"The World of Charles S. Roberts"
Forward is a direction. Forward has opposite backward. Understand "f" as forward.
Backward is a direction. Backward has opposite forward. Understand "b" and "back" as backward.
Forward left is a direction. Forward left has opposite backward right. Understand "fl" as forward left.
Forward right is a direction. Forward right has opposite backward left. Understand "fr" as forward right.
Backward left is a direction. Backward left has opposite forward right. Understand "bl" as backward left.
Backward right is a direction. Backward right has opposite forward left. Understand "br" as backward right.
Now to forbid the use of the compass directions:
A direction can be hexagonal or squared-off. A direction is usually squared-off. Forward, backward, forward left, forward right, backward left and backward right are hexagonal.
Before going a squared-off direction, say "In this hexagonally-divided landscape, squared-off directions are not allowed." instead.
A slight nuisance is that, with things as they are above, typing BACKWARD produces the response "Which do you mean, backward, backward left or backward right?" To avoid that silly question, we write:
Does the player mean going backward: it is very likely. Does the player mean going forward: it is very likely.
And now a clump of 37 hexes, in six columns of six or seven rooms each. There are many ingenious ways we could put this map together automatically, but instead we will take a deep breath and write:
E1 is forward of E2. "Open farmland." E2 is forward of E3. "The edge of woods." E3 is forward of E4. "Deep woodland." E4 is forward of E5. "Deep woodland." E5 is forward of E6. "The rear edge of woods." E6 is forward of E7. "The start of a road leading forward right." E7 is a room. "Grassland."
F1 is forward of F2. "The edge of farmland." F2 is forward of F3. "The edge of woods." F3 is forward of F4. "Clearing in woods." F4 is forward of F5. "Deep woodland." F5 is forward of F6. "A road runs backward left to forward right." F6 is a room. "The edge of grassland."
G1 is forward of G2. "Grassland." G2 is forward of G3. "The edge of farmland." G3 is forward of G4. "A copse of trees." G4 is forward of G5. "The backward edge of woodland." G5 is forward of G6. "A bend in the road, from backward left to backward right." G6 is forward of G7. "Open farmland." G7 is a room. "Open farmland."
H1 is forward of H2. "Grassland, bordered by a hedge to the right." H2 is forward of H3. "The edge of farmland, with a hedge to forward right." H3 is forward of H4. "A copse of trees." H4 is forward of H5. "Open farmland." H5 is forward of H6. "A passing place on the road, which bends forward left to forward right." H6 is a room. "Open farmland."
I1 is forward of I2. "The end of a forward road, blocked by hedges on all sides except backward." I2 is forward of I3. "A straight road runs forward to backward, with long hedges to left and right." I3 is forward of I4. "A straight road runs forward to backward, alongside a long hedge to right." I4 is forward of I5. "A straight road runs forward to backward, alongside a long hedge to right." I5 is forward of I6. "Where three roads, forward, backward left and backward right, meet. Forward right is a thick hedge." I6 is forward of I7. "Open farmland." I7 is a room. "Open farmland."
J1 is forward of J2. "Dense woodland, with a hedge to left." J2 is forward of J3. "Grassland, with a hedge to left." J3 is forward of J4. "The edge of farmland, with a hedge to left." J4 is a room. "Open farmland, with a long hedge blocking movement forward left, backward left or backward." J5 is forward of J6. "A road running forward left to backward right, alongside a hedge." J6 is a room. "Open farmland."
F1 is forward right of E2 and backward right of E1. F2 is forward right of E3 and backward right of E2. F3 is forward right of E4 and backward right of E3. F4 is forward right of E5 and backward right of E4. F5 is forward right of E6 and backward right of E5. F6 is forward right of E7 and backward right of E6.
G1 is forward right of F1. G2 is forward right of F2 and backward right of F1. G3 is forward right of F3 and backward right of F2. G4 is forward right of F4 and backward right of F3. G5 is forward right of F5 and backward right of F4. G6 is forward right of F6 and backward right of F5.
H1 is forward right of G2 and backward right of G1. H2 is forward right of G3 and backward right of G2. H3 is forward right of G4 and backward right of G3. H4 is forward right of G5 and backward right of G4. H5 is forward right of G6 and backward right of G5. H6 is forward right of G7 and backward right of G6.
I3 is forward right of H3 and backward right of H2. I4 is forward right of H4 and backward right of H3. I5 is forward right of H5 and backward right of H4. I6 is forward right of H6 and backward right of H5.
J5 is forward right of I6 and backward right of I5. J6 is forward right of I7 and backward right of I6.
And now we have a hexagonally-gridded world. Route-finding will work; prepositional forms like "to be mapped backward left of" exist, just as they should; and in general these directions are just as good as the square ones. (The only thing which doesn't look good is the Index map, where Inform is just unable to draw a picture because it assumes a square grid. But that has no effect on play.)
The landscape is much easier to navigate with a little diagram:
To say legend (D - direction):
let destination hex be the room D from the location;
if the destination hex is nothing, say " ";
otherwise say the destination hex.
Carry out looking:
say "[fixed letter spacing] \ [legend forward] /[line break][legend forward left] ---- [legend forward right][line break] / \[line break]--< [location] >--[line break] \ /[line break][legend backward left] ---- [legend backward right][line break] / [legend backward] \[variable letter spacing][line break]".
And finally:
The player is in I5.
Test me with "f / forward / backward left / bl / br / br / f".
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