§8.4. Furniture
Most domestic furniture consists of supporters and containers of one size or another. This means that the simplest furniture needs no elaborate instructions:
The candlestick is on the dining table. The dining table is fixed in place.
The silver salt cellar is on the serving trolley. The serving trolley is pushable between rooms.
The pillow is on the bed. The bed is enterable and fixed in place.
The examples below are therefore mostly ways to get around the usual restrictions on containers (that they only have one interior) and supporters (that they cannot simultaneously be containers as well).
Yolk of Gold provides a set of drawers, that is, a container with multiple interiors.
U-Stor-It provides a way to have containers with a lid which is also a supporter.
Swigmore provides a supporter which holds up the player, but has no top surface as such, and cannot hold up anything else. Kiwi demonstrates a kind of high shelf, whose objects cannot be seen or used unless the player stands on a ladder.
Princess and the Pea shows how a pile of supporters, each on top of the last, could be managed.
Tamed demonstrates furniture large enough to get inside, or on top of.
Circle of Misery demonstrates a conveyor belt, which can hold multiple items but only brings one of them within the player's reach at a time.
See Position Within Rooms for a box that can be positioned and used as a stepping stool
See The Human Body for letting the player take different postures on furniture or on the floor
See Room Descriptions for tables and other furniture whose content listing is suppressed or modified in a room description
See Entering and Exiting, Sitting and Standing for making the player automatically rise from a seat before leaving the room
See Clocks and Scientific Instruments for a grandfather clock
See Kitchen and Bathroom for a mirror the player can look into
![]() | Start of Chapter 8: Vehicles, Animals and Furniture |
![]() | Back to §8.3. Animals |
![]() | Onward to §8.5. Kitchen and Bathroom |
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Suppose we want there to be some high shelves in our game, which the player can't get at unless he's standing on a prop of some kind. (This is a pretty hoary and over-used puzzle, but there may still be occasions when it becomes useful again.) In order to resolve this, we want to set up a raised supporter kind. When something is on a raised supporter, it should be mentioned to the player only if the player is in the right position (i.e., standing on something) and otherwise omitted from the description entirely.
Note that here we don't continue the activity because we want to completely replace the normal behavior of describing what is on supporters.
Now we also need to prevent the player from interacting with things that are out of reach:
...or restoring things to the shelves while the player is in the wrong position...
And raised supporters shouldn't be searchable from the ground either:
Finally, we need to tackle the case where the player types GET ALL FROM SHELF, because we don't want to list the objects up there if the player can't even see them. We use a rule for deciding whether all includes in order to tell Inform not to consider items that can't be reached, and then we adjust the parser error so that it's a little more instructive than "There are none at all available!", which is what the response would otherwise be:
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Suppose we want there to be some high shelves in our game, which the player can't get at unless he's standing on a prop of some kind. (This is a pretty hoary and over-used puzzle, but there may still be occasions when it becomes useful again.) In order to resolve this, we want to set up a raised supporter kind. When something is on a raised supporter, it should be mentioned to the player only if the player is in the right position (i.e., standing on something) and otherwise omitted from the description entirely.
Note that here we don't continue the activity because we want to completely replace the normal behavior of describing what is on supporters.
Now we also need to prevent the player from interacting with things that are out of reach:
...or restoring things to the shelves while the player is in the wrong position...
And raised supporters shouldn't be searchable from the ground either:
Finally, we need to tackle the case where the player types GET ALL FROM SHELF, because we don't want to list the objects up there if the player can't even see them. We use a rule for deciding whether all includes in order to tell Inform not to consider items that can't be reached, and then we adjust the parser error so that it's a little more instructive than "There are none at all available!", which is what the response would otherwise be:
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