§3.8. Sounds
It is too easily assumed that room descriptions are what the player sees, but as The Undertomb demonstrates, they might just as easily include ambient sounds.
So Inform's "listening to" action is the audio equivalent of "examining", rather than "looking". Despite this the player can type LISTEN, which Inform understands as listening to the everything in the location at once. A simple but effective way to handle this is shown in The Art of Noise.
Four Stars 2 adjusts the idea of "visibility" to make it behave differently for listening purposes: this introduces a formal idea of "audibility".
See Lighting for heightened hearing in darkness, and the rest of "Four Stars"
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![]() | Back to §3.7. Lighting |
![]() | Onward to §3.9. Passers-By, Weather and Astronomical Events |
This example creates a kind of room, "dead end", and gives each a textual description called its "river sound". Note the use of a text substitution to fill in the appropriate river sound text in each dead end.
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This example creates a kind of room, "dead end", and gives each a textual description called its "river sound". Note the use of a text substitution to fill in the appropriate river sound text in each dead end.
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