Re: Please help a beginner with Inform


Wed, 5 Jul 1995 16:26:46

In article <1995Jul5.033115.58685@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu> 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.

Not sure about this. Are you saying that the status line is one character
too short? If so, I think that's a 'feature' of the standard status line.
Curses uses a custom status line. It's not particularly serious, is it?
Unless I've misunderstood.

>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?

I'm not sure about the memory problem. I assume there must be a maximum
length of a piece of text in Inform that you're hitting, so you probably
need to do print statements.

My guess is that you're trying:

[ Initialise:

<stuff>

"This is the start of the very long intro to my game..... \
.......end of part 1.";
"Start of part 2....... \
........... and this is the end of the intro.";
];

This doesn't work because a piece of text as a statement on its own is in
fact a short-hand for
print_ret <text>;
which prints the text, followed by a new-line, then returns from the current
function (returning a value 1).

You need to do

print "Part 1.^";
"Part 2.";

(NB print doesn't automatically print a new-line after the text).

Kevin
=====