listing discontent

So, a couple things to talk about today, but one of them is more useful to Hugo users everywhere so I'll cover that one first.

As mentioned in another post, Roodylib now automatically lists the contents of the room's (non-quiet) platforms in a room's description. This might give some pre-existing games some unexpected behavior, but logically, I don't know why platforms should be treated any differently than containers.

Still, this puts some in an awkward position, because they are not familiar with the ways to avoid listing contents. Of course, the quiet attribute will prevent content listing until the player explicitly looks into the object (at which point it'll list the contents at every opportunity).

To have full control over when contents are listed, you have to use the list_contents property.

To only allow content-listing when the player explicitly LOOKS IN/ON:

list_contents

{

if verbroutine ~= &DoLookIn

return false

else

return true

}

To allow content-listing only for EXAMINE or LOOK IN:

list_contents

{

if verbroutine ~= &DoLookAround

return false

else

return true

}

So yeah, the three times that contents are listed are room descriptions ( &DoLookAround), object descriptions (&DoLook), and when looking in objects (&DoLookIn). Knowing that, you can write your own list_contents rules. Of course, you can still use list_contents to print your own content listings before you return true.

The other thing is that, while applying Roodylib to another game, it became apparent that there was a problem with my new DescribePlace system when the USE_PLURAL_OBJECTS flag is set. I had copied over some code from the old one that checked for identical objects without finessing it into the new code. When this error made me take a look at the code again, I had to calculate exactly how useful the code was.

In the old DescribePlace, the lines in question prevent identical objects from being listed among objects-with-short_desc's. I started thinking, well, hey, why can't we have it both ways? I then altered my code to allow identical objects with short_descs and found that, ok, ListObjects (the routine that tallies the identical objects) lists the same total regardless of which objects have already been described. So, long story short, there's now some code in there preventing that from happening.

There's still some work to do with the new DescribePlace. Right now, I think objects and characters with descriptions always have to be listed before their description-less counterparts. Eventually, I should see if I can make the order truly interchangeable. I'm not sure how often that situation comes up, but it'd be good to support it just the same.