>I'm faced with a similar dilemma regarding clothes. I would like to
>implement a "realistic" clothing class that would keep track of
>things like that you don't want to wear two ties, or a skirt
>under a pair of tights (while the other way round would be OK).
>However, such a system would be quite complicated. So far, I haven't
>really seen the need for it. Of course, it would be nice to have, but
>I have the feeling that _if_ I were to implement it in a game, then
>people would spend a disproportionate amount of time manipulating
>their clothing, just to fiond out that it didn't really matter to the
>plot.
Indeed! I wrote a new clothing class under TADS that did some of
this. It lets you wear a T-shirt underneath a jacket but not the other
way around... it prevents you from wearing two pairs of jeans
simultaneously, etc. etc. Mainly because it seemed like a neat idea
and because I'd never seen it done. And also because you can swim in
my game if you want, and it seemed stupid to me not to have the game
say something if you try to swim while wearing a skirt, boots and a
leather jacket, say.
However, it's not a hyper-accurate simulation by any means. As Dave
Baggett once asked, not entirely facetiously, "Does it let you take
off your T-shirt and wear it as a bandanna?" Indeed. I didn't even
bother to implement socks.
But I wonder if players of normal I-F, which doesn't go into such
elaborate detail regarding clothes, would see it as some Important
Puzzle that Had to be Solved and waste a lot of time? Oh, well. It's a
self-indulgent thing that doesn't really advance the narrative, but
then so are footnotes in I-F generally. Most of the point of writing
I-F these days, in a market clamouring for quality I-F at any cost, is
that the authors have fun, right?
- Neil K.
-- 49N 16' 123W 7' / Vancouver, BC, Canada / n_k_guy@sfu.ca