§9.7. Painting and Labeling Devices
Writing on something is only one way a player can change its visual appearance. IF authors have long been wary of paint brushes, because a sufficiently motivated player could go through a whole landscape like a graffiti artist with a railway bridge. We want to give the player the illusion of freedom of action, while avoiding a situation where unlimited numbers of different decorations might be needed - that would need a table of potentially unlimited size.
One approach is to limit the number of items which can be decorated. In Palette, only the canvas can be painted, and each image overlays the last. Early Childhood increases the range to allow a whole kind ("block") to be painted, and also shows how the changing colours can be used to distinguish between otherwise identical objects.
Brown finds a different way to limit the number of simultaneous decorations: almost anything can have a red sticky label attached, but there is only one red sticky label. (So to decorate a new item, the player must first un-decorate an old one.)
See Electricity and Magnetism for another form of stickiness
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Here is the essential point: whenever we ATTACH LABEL TO something, it becomes part of that object.
And of course the label cannot be stuck to itself or to more than one thing at a time.
Much of the rest is just tidying to make sure that the player's commands are redirected into the right syntax.
We could have created a new "sticking" action, but to keep the example short we will use the built-in "tying" action instead, and respond to the command "stick" just as if it were "tie".
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Here is the essential point: whenever we ATTACH LABEL TO something, it becomes part of that object.
And of course the label cannot be stuck to itself or to more than one thing at a time.
Much of the rest is just tidying to make sure that the player's commands are redirected into the right syntax.
We could have created a new "sticking" action, but to keep the example short we will use the built-in "tying" action instead, and respond to the command "stick" just as if it were "tie".
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