§9.9. Televisions and Radios
IF authors often provide clues or background information to the player by means of radio broadcasts, TV shows or video tapes because they can talk to the player without needing to listen back, or to react to what the player does. The simplest radio set, like the one in Aftershock, really only has one thing to say: which is serendipitously being broadcast just at the moment the player tunes in (regardless of when that is). The next simplest approach is to spool a broadcast on an endless loop taking several turns to play through, as in Radio Daze.
Televisions come in all shapes and sizes, and Aspect allows their shape ("aspect ratio") to be described by the player.
In Channel 1, we can also refer to the television by what it is currently showing: thus WATCH CHANNEL 4 will work if the set is indeed tuned to 4. In Channel 2, numbered channel changing is taken further: we can now TUNE TV TO CHANNEL 3, as well. Channel 2 is a reasonable base implementation of a television for many purposes.
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Our previous implementation of televisions ("Channel 1") doesn't allow the player to type things like
nor does it deal with player input like
or
where no television is specified. When we are designing commands which involve two elements (here, a television and a channel number), it's usually a good idea to allow the player to specify those elements in either order, as we saw demonstrated briefly in "New commands for old grammar". We might, therefore, want to add a few refinements: first by defining a "[channel]" token that will accept input of the forms "[number]" and "channel [number]", and second by creating some additional "Understand" lines that will accept variant versions of the player's input.
And we add the scenario-specific content to our Table of Television Channels; in the case of channel 13, we provide for a changing sequence of events using text variations.
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Our previous implementation of televisions ("Channel 1") doesn't allow the player to type things like
nor does it deal with player input like
or
where no television is specified. When we are designing commands which involve two elements (here, a television and a channel number), it's usually a good idea to allow the player to specify those elements in either order, as we saw demonstrated briefly in "New commands for old grammar". We might, therefore, want to add a few refinements: first by defining a "[channel]" token that will accept input of the forms "[number]" and "channel [number]", and second by creating some additional "Understand" lines that will accept variant versions of the player's input.
And we add the scenario-specific content to our Table of Television Channels; in the case of channel 13, we provide for a changing sequence of events using text variations.
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