more parent(player) shenanigans!

So, notice in that last post how, when the player is in an enterable container, DescribePlace doesn't do a good job of specifying which objects are outside the container, what with all of those "this-and-that is here" messages?  Doesn't that bother you?  It bothered me!

So, the next thing I worked on was making that stuff get listed better when the player is in a container.  Here's what the final product looks like:

Currently, my code doesn't do anything with platforms, because while "So-and-so is here on the couch." sounds nice, what do you say for the the things NOT on the couch?  The best I could come up with is "is also in the room." or something, but it'd have to be easily changeable for all of the instances where the room is not a "room" (say, an open space or what have you).

Anyhow, as much as I like the idea of games sounding smarter, this isn't going to go into Roodylib at this point, either.  In the meantime, you can look at the code that I wrote to do it (important stuff is highlighted):

Maybe not the easiest stuff in the world to read, but if any of you want any help getting something like this working in your game, just let me know!

Some non-Roodylib parent(player) code

It seems like I've been spending a lot of time this year making sure Roodylib handles parent objects as well as possible, and every so often, I find something to tweak.

The other day, I found myself thinking about the old player-in-a-closed-container situation.  For my purposes, I was coding a coffin in a room.  Once the player is in the coffin and closes it, I wanted only objects within the coffin to be within reach (and seen).

Of course, it doesn't work out of the box, and I went on this epic quest, updating DoOpen, DoClose, FindLight, ObjectIsLight, and FindObject.  I was attempting to code an elaborate system that tried to figure out if the player can be seen from the location and act accordingly.  Working against me was the fact that FindObject likes to take for granted that the player object can always be seen, no matter what room is being used with it.  I tried so hard to tweak it to work for all occasions, but some instance was always breaking.

It's probably for the best that it never worked because who wants to add all of that code, anyway?  Eventually, it occurred to me that the easiest thing an author could do was just to set the coffin as the location when it was closed (and the room to the location when it was opened again).  Here is some example code:

It's possible that I didn't think of every verbroutine instance to be covered when the player is in the container, but that should be a good start!

Closing the coffin without a light source

More coffin antics coming in the next post!!