Reply-To: "Kent Tessman" <kent@remove-to-reply.generalcoffee.com>
From: "Kent Tessman" <kent@remove-to-reply.generalcoffee.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
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Subject: Re: In IF game how to introduce passage of time
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Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 20:56:55 -0500
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"Ashley Price" <ashleyprice@DELETE_THIS_btinternet.com> wrote in message
news:a4fttg$nh3$1@helle.btinternet.com...
> HUGO (which I assume is the IF system she is writing her game on) uses a
> counter for each move and is a sort of clock in that each move is a
"minute"
> in time. (See my previous post on this subject).

Mind you, that's just the translation between turns and minutes (which is
the default for the library if the statusline is set to display time instead
of turns).  This is how games like Spur and Guilty Bastards do it.  (And the
source code for Down shows how to modify the system so that a single turn
can take less than one minute of game time.)

A somewhat more complex approach to handling time is in Gilles Duchesne's
excellent Scavenger Hunt tutorial, where the amount of time taken by various
actions is tweaked.  The source for the tutorial is at:

http://www.plover.net/~lonecleric/hugo/

(ScavHunt5.htm is the step with the timing additions, I believe.)

Keep in mind, also, that you don't necessarily have to tell the player what
time it is, or have the game time reflect the internal counter.  It's
sometimes desirable not to give an explicit time and yet still have events
occur on some sort of turn-counter-based schedule (which may or may not be
invisible to the player).

--Kent



