# Gadgets

Some IF games make use of various gadgets such as buttons, levers and dials to construct devices for the player character to interact with. The basis for a few simple such gadgets is provided in the gadget.t module. If your game doesn't make use of any of these gadgets you can safely exclude gadget.t from the build.

## Buttons and Levers

A Button is simply a Thing that can be pushed. You can define the effects of pushing it in its makePushed method.

A Lever is only slightly more complicated in that it has two states and can be pulled or pushed depending on which state it's in. When isPulled is nil the lever can be pulled (which makes isPulled true). When isPulled is true the lever can be pushed back into its original state again. You can override the makePulled(stat) method to carry out any side-effects of pulling and pushing the lever, but remember to call the inherited method (i.e. included a call to inherited(stat)) somewhere in your overridden method).

## Settables and Dials

A Settable is a Thing that can be set to one of a number of values with commands such as SET WHATEVER TO VALUE. To create a SETTABLE you need to define its validSettings property as a list of single-quoted strings defining the values to which it can be set and its curSetting property given as a single-quoted string (to define its initial setting; curSetting is updated each time the player issues a SET command). By default the Settable class converts the setting requested to lower case before checking its validity (e.g. SET SLIDER TO OFF would be treated as a request to set it to 'off'), so you would normally need to define the strings in the validSettings property as lower case. If you want to use upper case or mixed case settings you can override the canonicalizeSetting(val) to do something different appropriately (either returning val.toUpper or returning val unchanged, for example). To carry out any side-effects of setting the slider (or whatever your SETTABLE represents) you can override makeSetting(val), but rememember to call the inherited method.

A Dial is simply a Settable that responds to TURN WHATEVER TO VALUE in the same way as SET WHATEVER TO VALUE. For example:

    + Dial 'dial'
        "It can be set to 'off', 'slow' or 'fast'; it's currently set to
        <<curSetting>>. "

        curSetting = 'off'

        validSettings = ['off', 'slow', 'fast']
    ;

A NumberedDial is a Dial that can be turned to any (integer) numerical setting between minSetting and maxSetting. Note that minSetting and maxSetting must be defined as numerical values, while curSetting is still a single-quoted string (representing a number). For example to define a dial that can be set to any number between 1 and 50 and starts out set to 2 you might do this:

    + NumberedDial 'dial'
        "It can be set to any number between 1 and 50; it's currently set to
        <<curSetting>>. "

        curSetting = '2'
        minSetting = 1
        maxSetting = 50
    ;

By default, a NumberedDial can only be set to integer settings, but if the allowDecimal property is set to true then any number within the specified range will be accepted as valid, even if it has a decimal point (so, for example, you could turn the dial to 3.42).

Finally, since most buttons, levers, sliders and dials are generally part of or attached to some other object rather than free-standing portable objects in themselves, by default all these classes are defined with isFixed = true (although you can of course override that on your individual gadgets if need be). You will in any case probably want to override cannotTakeMsg to something less generic, such as 'The dial is firmly attached to the safe' or 'The firing stud is an integral part of your trusty blaster.'

## BagOfHolding

Inventory management puzzles, which strictly limit the number of items the player character can carry and force the player to keep micromanaging what the PC is carrying, have rather dropped out of favour in Interactive Fiction (mainly because they tend to create a lot of busy-work and guesswork for players with no compensating gains). Modern IF thus often tends to allow player characters to carry around as much as they like. Some authors (and players), however, feel that it can seem rather unrealistic to allow the player character to carry around dozens of items at a time in his/her hands (and still have enough hands free to manipulate things in the game world!). One compromise that is sometimes employed is the "bag of holding". This is an object that the player character can carry with him or her into which items of his/her current inventory are moved when his/her hands become too full to take anything else. This allows the player character to carry a large amount — or even an unlimited amount — of stuff around while maintaining some semblance of realism. Often a bag of holding may need to be unrealistically Tardis-like (i.e. bigger on the inside than the outside) to carry out its function of allowing the player character to cart more stuff around than s/he could in his/her bare hands, but few players will mind that (and the effect can sometimes be mitigated if the bag of holding is something worn, like a knapsack).

And adv3Lite game can define any number of objects to be bags of holding. To make an object a bag of holding, we use the BagOfHolding mix-in class. This means (a) that BagOfHolding must appear first in the class list and (b) that it must be followed by an appropriate Thing-derived class like Container.

One method you may occasionally want to override on a BagOfHolding is affinityFor(obj). This should return a number. If the number is less than 1 for any given obj, then the library will not move that obj from the player's inventory into that BagOfHolding when trying to make room for the player to take something else. If the player is carrying more than one BagOfHolding, then the one that will be used to take obj from the player's inventory is the one for which affinityFor(obj) returns the greatest value. By default the library returns 100 for every obj except the BagOfHolding itself, for which it returns 0 (to prevent any attempt by the library to move a BagOfHolding into itself to make room in the player character's hands).

When choosing an object to move into a BagOfHolding, the library simply scans the player character's contents list in order, passing over items that are too big to fit into the BagOfHolding or fixed in place (such as body parts). This will tend to cause a "first taken, first moved into bag" effect. This may sometimes produce undesirable effects, like moving a light source into a bag of holding when the player character is in a dark room. To prevent this we can make the bag of holding's affinity for light sources zero, for example:

    knapsack: BagOfHolding, Wearable, OpenableContainer 'knapsack; brown canvas large'
        "It's a large, brown knapsack made of canvas. "

        affinityFor(obj)
        {
            return obj.isLit ? 0 : inherited(obj);
        }
    ;

adv3Lite Library Manual
Table of Contents | Optional Modules > Gadgets
Prev: Extras Next: Menus