Re: Please help a beginner with Inform


Wed, 5 Jul 1995 11:16:16 -0400

ceforma@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Christopher E. Forman) writes:
> I've got a couple questions about Inform, and I'm fairly new at this...
>
> Whenever I compile a draft of my game and run it, the status line stops one
> space away from the right side of the screen. That is, there's a single
> block of blue there. Is there any way to fix this, or should I use a
> different ZIP interpreter to run the game? I've noticed none of the games
> by Graham Nelson se to have this problem, but Odieus and a couple others do.

If you look at the DrawStatusLine routine in the library (in
"parser"), you'll see the line
spaces (0->33) - 1;
(0->33) returns the width of the screen, so this prints that many
(inverse) spaces minus 1.

I'd be wary of changing this, though, because if you go one more, the
status window might scroll or add an extra line of height. If you
diddle, check the results on every interpreter you can find.

> Second, how can I make the buffer size big enough to have a long intro, like
> in Beyond Zork? If I try to make the it too big, I run out of memory, and
> Inform won't seem to let me do two print statements in a row. Is there a
> correct way to separate them that I'm not sure of?

You certainly can do two print statements in a row.

print "blah...^";
print "blah...^";

Remember that

"blah...";

(the bare-string statement) does a print, newline, return; so you
can't do two of *those* in a row. Use a sequence of "print" statements
followed by "return", or a sequence of "print"s followed by a
bare-string statement.

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."