Reset most of the things in the game to their initial conditions.

Question

I'm working on a game where it's possible to go back in time. When it happens, things must all reset their position and properties. I created an activiy to reset stuff:

(just to be clear, you can only go back to the starting point, so there's no need to remember the position of things in a given time, just put them back on their initial positions)

Resetting the world is an activity.

For resetting the world:
    now the player is on your bed;
    now the alarm clock is on the chest of drawers;
    now your room's door is closed;
    now ...

The problem is, when the game is finished, this will probably have hundreds and hundreds of lines and will be quite hard to maintain. Is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

I don't know of any really concise way of doing this, but I'm no expert. For the rooms that things start in, I'd give every thing a room attribute and when things are reset I'd place them via setting this attribute:

The World is  a room.

Every thing has a room called start position.

The chest of drawers is a supporter.
The bed is an enterable supporter.
The alarm clock is a thing.

The start position of the player is the World.
The start position of the alarm clock is the World.
The start position of the bed is the World.
The start position of the chest of drawers is the World.

When play begins:
    reset the world.

To reset the world:
    repeat with x running through all things:
        now x is in the start position of x.

But this doesn't account for the state of relations, such as being on a supporter, and all the other attributes a thing might have, e.g. open or closed. Also, this way, you couldn't have an item out of play; it would have to get a starting position of "a room called nowhere" or some other dummy room.

Comments

Your answer gave me an idea.. do you think it would work if I did something like this:


Every thing has an object called start position. [object, instead of room here]

A thing can be a-thing-that-start-in-a-room, a-thing-that-start-in-a-container or a-thing-that-start-on-a-supporter.

To reset the world:
        repeat with x running through all things:
                if x is a-thing-that-start-in-a-room:
                        now x is in the start position of x;
                if x is a-thing-that-start-in-a-container:
                        now x is inside the start position of x;
                if x is a-thing-that-start-on-a-supporter:
                        now x is on the start position of x.

or something like that...

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Maybe you can keep it simpler:  Every thing has an object (you're right there) called start position. And then, in the loop: if the start position of x is a room: now x is in the start position of x; otherwise if the start position x is a supporter: now x is on the start position of x, and so on.

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You can safely use "now x is in the start position of x" regardless of whether the start position is a container, a supporter or something else. Internally there is no difference between in, inside and on; the type of the parent object determines the type of the containment.

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That's great!!! I tried it and it worked, my source is so elegant now! I tried that with a person and it also worked, the item was being carried by the person.

One thing that I tried and didn't work was to assign the player as the initial position of something. It gave the following message: "[...] while this does make sense as an object, it is a value which exists and changes during play, and which doesn't make sense to use when setting up the initial state of things."

What exactly is the player? Is it something like a pointer or a reference would be in c++? Is there a way make this work with the player? I really don't need to right now, but I'm curious...

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"The player" is a global variable that contains a reference to the person object that is the current player character. The default player character is "yourself" so unless you've change it you can write that instead.

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Thank you very much. That's perfect.

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After all that, I actually ended in another problem, but it was worth creating a new question... I asked it here: http://ifanswers.com/1128/copying-location-thing-variable-something-other-than-room