Patted On the Head Again (Inform 7 Docs)
While working on New Cat, I was curious how to do a one-time room description; in Inform 6, I used the visited attribute. How could I do it in Inform 7?
As it turns out, I’m still not sure. I searched through the documentation provided by the IDE, and the results returned by the search were completely unhelpful. The closest thing I got was a page that talked about how to set the initial descriptions of items, but which (horribly unhelpfully) noted that you can’t do that with a room because a room doesn’t have an initial attribute. And how was this noted? You guessed it — with the usual pat on the head, the “good dog” kind of insulting, demeaning language. Yes, the personality of the writer (whom we all know) is shining though. Freaking thanks. So what are the properties of a room? Are they the same as in I6? If so, how do I manipulate them in I7?
Fifteen minutes of looking didn’t turn up an answer to any of these questions. Ok, fine, whatever. I went out there to find other manuals and apparently no-one else has addressed this issue either, which I find nothing short of amazing.
I guess it’s up to me to write an Inform 6 -> Inform 7 technical guide which explains how to do the things in I7 that you used to do in I6.
The August Doldrums
Seasons is still going, although not as quickly as I would like. Right now I’m stitching together summer, which as far as bare-bones plot goes is roughly at 60%. I know what the other puzzles are, I just have to complete them and make it winnable. I’m not sure what to do about thirst in this season. I’ll probably take it out. I might take it out of the game completely. Although it’s realistic, it’s one of those things that might be too real in that it distracts from the enjoyment of playing a game.
New Cat I haven’t touched since I started it a few weeks back. The ideas are still in my mind, but I’ve been distracted by my angsty social/political life, I guess.
Brickhouse is moving forward in starts and fits. I’ve got the atmosphere down cold. I just figured out how to do timers in ALAN last night, so the first scene should be done tonight. Then I’m on to objects in the first few rooms. It’s fun learning a new language and wrapping your brain around a different perception of the world.
The Hands of the Chloroform Crowd
The status quo is often worshiped as something to maintain at all costs by the residents of small communities online; reality can also descend into this unthinking stasis, but it has the advantage of multi-channel communication and the fact that it is real and thus inescapable, to pull against such tendencies. Not so online where involvement, duty, and responsibility in any community are abstract first and usually wholly absent. Woe be to any who challenge the maddening wisdom of the crowd! It does not have to be this way, but in an immoral world, the only virtue is tranquility. Not utility; not freedom; not creativity; only the saccharine milk of false peace. Anyone who thus ripples the waters is the enemy.
The hands of the chloroform crowd will reach out for you and choke off your air. They will trash your house if you let them; they will hijack your threads; they will bury your reviews; they will wage a long, steady war against you like insane ducks, nibbling a little day by day, month by month, and year by year. The inferior spirits whose battle cries are “sameness!” and whom stand for nothing more than feeding the various cults of personality, inhabit every crevice in small communities. Like trolls, they may have once been thinking, once had the ability to discern moral truths, but have blinded themselves to history and have degenerated into lesser beings through endless repetitions of their empty slogans.
Most cannot withstand this Chinese water torture, and my mercies go out to them. It takes some kind of determination to press on through the sea of assailants, and I think it wholly impossible unless directed by the Divine. The lure of the warm earth-lair, the easy hemlock of “go along, get along” has seduced many to their deaths, allowing the reign of the imperfect to crush the rest underfoot. What reward awaits an endless resistance?
There are several, but chief among them is the sweet reward of integrity — of sticking to your guns and never giving up.
TADS 3 Doesn’t Suck As Much
Ok, I take back my earlier post about the suck factor of TADS 3. It looks like there is a well-developed IDE for TADS 3: Uli’s Workbench for TADS 0.4. I don’t know if it will run on anything below Mac OS 10.5, but at least there is something. Strangely, it’s not mentioned by the official TADS 3 site at all.
I’ve written the webmaster to he can give Uli some link love. It would avoid some frustration for newbies at the least!
The Rape Tree
I’ve discovered that when various know-it-alls and appeasers can’t comment on my posts here, they’ll hijack threads on R*IF where their own groupies will trumpet them with fulsome praise. Interesting.
One point that this proves: willful ignorance and historical amnesia are a necessary part of any dictatorship or oligarchy, even one online. As long as people are willing to forget the past, and/or as long as the past never applied directly to them, why they can act as sanctimonious as the alphabet networks in commenting on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Like them they rise above it all to issue fine-sounding silver-tongued pronouncements that cause their groupies to have mental orgasms (much like reporters enter states of bliss whenever Obama opens his mouth). See, the experiences of others are either unimportant or so subjective that they cannot possibly be true! All that matters is the perpetuation of the status quo. Sure, we must crucify a few heretics and immolate a few dissidents, but as long as the community continues, all will be well. It’s much like Soviet statism.
Only life experiences (or perhaps a revelation) will ever wake these people up, but I’ll set up this rape tree as a reminder, burned in the electrons of this intangible world. When you reach this point in time, I’ll be there to welcome you to dystopia. I warned you and you would not listen, but when you arrive, you will know full well the awful truth and it will flow through your veins like fire.
Until then, as always, I am Cassandra.
