Formatting

In that last bout of Roodylib attachables improvement, playing around with the "Vault of Hugo" sample game made me check out some other things, too.  Specifically, I was reminded that Roodylib's doublespace formatting option worked imperfectly.  This is how it looked when it attempted the Vault of Hugo's "Object Room."

(there are no commands listed since it is the result of a recording playback)

As you can see, spacing is inconsistent, with no extra lines between the two items with short_desc's (and all of the non-short_desc-related objects are clumped together, too).

I set out to fix this- and not only that, as I also decided I wanted Roodylib to have an option for smart room descriptions if the player is in an object (I had gotten a test case of this working months ago but it still required some code clean-up and adapting to put it into Roodylib).

Not only this, but I also wanted to make sure that rooms printed properly with the LIST_F format option on.  This is the setting that does "tall" listings like those in Zork:

>look

West of House

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.

There is a small mailbox here.

The small mailbox contains:

  A leaflet

>

I can't remember how broke the alignment was before I started this latest wave of improvement.  Might have not been that broke, but with Hugo, "The small mailbox contains:" was indented once and the next line twice.  This was probably intentional, but to be honest, I prefer the Zork version.  Hugo also didn't capitalize the article for children like "A leaflet".  I've changed that, too, since again, I liked the Zork way.  If I had my druthers, I'd make both of these things optional but as it is, configuring DescribePlace to your needs is already going to be a bunch of global variable tinkering and flag setting.  Still, one day I might re-design the WhatsIn and ListObjects routines so they're much more configurable.

While I was at it, I also added my system for smarter listing when the player in a container in the room (it's possible to configure it to also do platforms, but it was hard to come up with a wording that'd work for all cases- if you're on a chair, do you really want to describe all other objects in the room as "off the chair"?).

FORMAT global set to DESCFORM_F and COOL_PARENTS flag set

FORMAT with LIST_F (you'll notice that I changed how Indent works with LIST_F just so the two systems use the same logic)

The cauldron and the grandstand listed are not in the original game.  I added them just to test the part of DescribePlace's code that lists the children of scenery items.

Now let's take a look at some of the behavior if the NEW_DESCRIBEPLACE flag is set.

NEW_DESCRIBEPLACE with doubles-pacing on

The new DescribePlace defaults to having children of scenery listed right away, right after children of parent-of-player.  I figured it's better for them to be closer to wherever they were mentioned in the room text.  Ideally, I'd have an extra check in there to list attachables-connected-to-scenery objects right up there, but I don't think that comes up enough to justify the extra work for now.

With double-spacing on, it only prints newlines (and the extra space) when it needs to.  All those extra spaces might look kind of ugly in that example right there (since that room has so many objects), but I'm fairly certain that it'll look quite nice in the average IF game.

I'm pretty happy with the different options I've given the DescribePlace system although the extra settings I've created could probably use some finessing.

Right now, there are the following additional Roodylib options:

• Set the "COOL_PARENTS" flag (this gives the room better relative text when the player is in a container in the room)...  My gripe about this name is that it's close to my SMART_PARENTS flag (which gives better responses when a player tries to go in an unavailable direction while, like, sitting in a chair or something).
• Give FORMAT the DESCFORM_I mask. DESCFORM_I gets rid of the extra new line before a room title is printed, based on Infocom layout (hence the I).  Just the same, the F in DESCFORM_F probably stands for "flag" so changing it to I is probably just confusing.
• Set the "NEW_DESCRIBEPLACE" flag.  This gives the extra functionality of the new DescribePlace code.  I'm pretty fine with this one.
• Give FORMAT the DESCFORM_D mask.  If the new DescribePlace system is on, this turns on double-spacing.

Beyond the probably-confusing names of my new masks and flags, I'm not sure I even want to expect new authors to know how to change this stuff- if I recall correctly, FORMAT masks are covered very briefly in the manual; pretty sure I learned most of what I know just by looking at hugolib.h.

I'd like to make it easier for authors by creating some routines that will set the game to the formatting they prefer, but even that is kind of a headache. *

* I was going to continue with the annoying aspects of trying to design and name helper routines, but I think I might have an idea I'd like to play with.  Stay tuned!

more roodylib updates

I added a lot to Roodylib today. The biggest chunk of code was probably my new (optional)  DescribePlace system. All in all, Roodylib went from 160 KB to 181 KB.

I also "released" my port of Cardinal Teulbach's SceptreQuest, which I uploaded to http://roody.gerynarsabode.org/games/squest.hex (I use quotes because I don't intend to announce the game any where besides here and my twitter account, as the copyright on the game doesn't technically allow re-release like this). Writing that inspired several Roodylib updates today. We'll get to that in a bit.

First off, I added an AMERICAN_ENGLISH flag to Roodylib. It really doesn't change as much as you'd think. All it really does is move quotation mark placement for statements such as "I don't understand the word 'blah.'"

As mentioned I also added that DescribePlace stuff. When I ported SceptreQuest, I also coded its odd color handling. I found that this involved changing color at places that forced me to replace whole hugolib routines, so among other things, I added calls to RLibMessages to handle different printed tasks for DescribePlace (such as the printing of the room name), WhatsIn, and ListObjects. As far as ListObjects goes, there are probably more bits of text that I could sent to a message routine, but I'll add those as needed.

 I also finally added that DESCFORM_I constant to act as a FORMAT mask. When enabled, DescribePlace does not print the blank line before printing the room name. It now does this check (in RLibMessage):

                    if not (FORMAT & DESCFORM_I) or (verbroutine ~= &MovePlayer and
                    verbroutine ~= &DoLookAround and a = location)
                        print "\n";

The location check allows one to use DescribePlace to fake movement to rooms (where it should not print a new line) but still prints a new line for when things like newmenu.h call DescribePlace after having printed "returning to the story...".

The next thing I'm considering working on is a combination of Future Boy's time object class and improved resource.h  routines where things like audio.current_music is automatically cleared after the song is over. Going over it in my head, though, has me thinking it might be too bulky for Roodylib-inclusion so I may just improve my already-existing-but-separate jukebox system to do that. We shall see!

space layout, the final frontier

When I released my first work of IF, I think the concept I was most lost with was how to do proper spacing in my game. There really aren't any guides on the different styles you can use for your game, and I found my game was really inconsistent and wished one existed. I eventually would learn that it boils down to "try to figure out the assumptions your language already makes and copy that." Still, even after all of these years, I can imagine some merit in such a guide.

Hugo, in particular, is especially confusing, as it introduces indented text, and there isn't really a large body of work out there to fully get how it's to be used, especially since it clashes with the Infocom games we grew up with. Over the years, I have come to respect the indentation system and appreciate the look it brings to the system. Just the same, if only to better understand the different styles, I've made it a quest to better support Infocom-style spacing in Hugo games.

Out of the box, Hugo can do some Infocom-style spacing things if you give the FORMAT global the DESCFORM_F flag. When that is set, the text in the status line is offset by a space, so it is not right up to the edge of the screen. Also, there's an extra line between the room description and the room contents listing.  My DescribePlace  replacement has furthered this, by including an extra line between every type of object in the room content listing.

A few days ago, I continued refining this "Infocom style Hugo mode", mainly because one of my WIPs is an homage to Infocom. The big change is that there is no longer an automatic empty line before a room listing. Coupled with the NOINDENT_F flag, it looks quite Infocom-y.

At first, I tied this behavior into DESCFORM_F, but I then decided that that was too much Infocom all of the time as I have come to appreciate the semi-Infocom look in some of my other games. I decided to give that behavior to a new flag that I called DESCFORM_I.

Anyhow, the new changes have been making me tweak this and that, as now it's up to any code that prints something before DescribePlace to also print an extra line. I'm liking the new behavior, but figure it'll be some time before this has settled in right among all extensions that call DescribePlace.

I think I'm due to upload several updates. I noticed some horrible behavior in the default menu for newmenu.h. I've since fixed it, but it's one of those things that makes you scratch your head and wonder how it got out the door in the first place. I think newautomap.h had some kind of update, too.

Anyhow, the work on this extension stuff has been kind of disheartening, what with all of the leaks that have popped up. I hope to get some good WIP progress done soon.