Dark Rooms

Dark Rooms

Dark Rooms are locations where you can only see the description of the room and examine objects in that room if there is some sort of light source nearby.  Normally this would be some sort of hand held light source like a torch or a lantern.

The ADRIFT Standard Library has built in functionality to handle dark rooms.

Specifying the dark rooms

To mark a room as a dark room, simply edit the Dark Locations group, and select all rooms that should be dark:

Creating light sources

To create a light source, simply create your object, then add it to the Light Sources group:

And that's all there is to it.  The Look and Examine tasks use these two groups to decide whether or not to display the normal descriptions, or alternative ones.

If you want an object to become a light source in the game, you can simply add or remove it from the Light Sources group using task actions.  Similarly, if a location should suddenly become a dark location, you can add or remove it from the Dark Locations group in the same way.

Interacting with hidden objects

Using the above technique, objects will be hidden from view and cannot be examined.  But they are still actually there.  There are three things you can do here:

• Leave the objects as they are - This will allow the player to still interact with them if they know they are there.
• Move the objects away - You would need to create a task that moves all objects in the location to a "store" location when there is no light source, and back again when a light source is nearby.
• Modify the library tasks - You can modify the specific actions you don't want to allow to take place on the objects.  This is probably the best approach as it gives you most flexibility.  For example, you could modify the Take Objects From Location task by adding a restriction that (Player must be in same location as any object in group Light Sources OR Player must not be in group Dark Rooms), so that you can only take objects if you can see them.