TADS Help - Beds and Chairs

                   Sent in by the Grue!

Some time with TADS you might have a bed or a chair in your game
that the player can lie on or sit on. In these circumstances the
bed or chair will be a nested room.

This can cause problems (Sue knows about these) when the player
tries to take an object from the room that the bed or chair is
nested in.  When the player tries to take an object the game
responds, something like..

I don't know how to take that!

This is not very good as it isn't clear what the player is trying
to take.  But if you add a line, isReachable = true, under the
item that the player is trying to take, then the game will
display...

I don't know how to take the bowl!
(As long as the bowl is in that room)

At least that is better than the previous response but the player
still cannot take or manipulate the bowl in any way as long as he
is on the bed or chair.  If you need the player to be able to
reach and take an object while they are on the bed or chair, you
would put all the objects in a reachable list like this...

reachable = ( [ bowl towel soap ] )

You really should make the bed or chair reachable also, seeing as
though you are on the object. To do this you would type the line
in as this...

reachable = ( [ bowl towel soap ] + self )

Sometime it might be better to make everything in the containing
room as reachable.  Then if you wanted the player to do something
specific to a particular item, you could do that directly under
the entry for that item.  To make everything in the containing
room reachable all you have to do is..

reachable = ( self.location.contents )

Hopefully this will make it a little bit clearer as how to make
use of the reachable feature in a TADS game. (Even I nearly
understand it now?)











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