3FWJQWNQFWCZFTKAR8[1]This week I didn’t make significant forward progress on content.  Partially that was due to the fact that I participated in the last instance of the Champions Online closed beta, and partially the fact that I spent my Inform programming time on fixing up infrastructure in what I hope will be the last major structural enhancement I have to do.

What I did was primarily to clean up the implementation of the main computer as a person who moves with the player, and to uncover and implement the appropriate rules required to allow the player to perform an action involving asking the computer to operate on something that isn’t in the immediate area.

The Inform documentation covers this, but in individual bits.  There are several examples covering conversation and persuasion.  There are other examples covering scope and different ways to implement action-at-a-distance.  Putting them together was a touch tricky, but not too bad overall.

So currently I have everything up to the end of Scene 3 complete, with a good basis for moving forward.  This week should be productive, which it needs to be since I need to have the basic implementation complete in two weeks if I’m to have a hope of testing and polishing adequately.