I7 : realistic max number of rooms?

Authoring Inform 7
1

Just tried 512 rooms with doors between them - just how many rooms can inform be expected to handle?

(I was gonna post example code, but would you imagine - no more than 60000 characters are allowed!)

2

Possibly a more relevant question is, How many rooms can your players be expected to handle?

3

You’ll have to start turning up memory use settings, but that’s easy.

I think the compiler starts getting slow at a few thousand rooms. (The compile process, not the game.) Or maybe it was a few tens of thousands. Someone posed this as a challenge a few years ago and I didn’t find a hard upper limit.

The performance problems on LOOK that I mentioned in the other thread are about total number of things, not rooms. (But doors are things, of course.)

4

Okay! I’m just playing around with some ‘open world’ where the player digs passages in a mine.

So with seven rooms in each xyz cordinate:
7x7x7 = 343 rooms
The player starts off in the center. Then he will be able to dig out 3 rooms in either direction, before reaching the edge.

By the way - any way to see if a door is east of the location? (that is, if it is placed on the east wall)
EDIT: Figure it out: direction of the-door from the location

5

You could implement these 343 rooms with one Inform room using a dynamic table of room connections that have been dug. It will be more difficult if you allow the player to drop items in the mine, but not terribly hard.

I interpreted this as “is any door east of the location” rather than “is a particular door east of the location”. Since I already wrote it before I saw your edit:

The wooden door is a door. It is east of Room1 and west of Room2.
The iron door is a door. It is above Room2 and below Room3.
Room4 is east of Room2.

To decide whether there's a door to the (D - direction):
	if the door D of the location is a door, decide yes;
	otherwise decide no.
	
Door detecting is an action out of world applying to nothing.
Understand "doors" as door detecting.

Carry out door detecting:
	let doors found be false;
	repeat with D running through directions:
		if there's a door to the D:
			now doors found is true;
			say "There's a door [if D is up]above [us][else if D is down]below [us][else]to the [D][end if].";
	if doors found is false:
		say "There are no doors here."

Test me with "doors / e / doors / e / doors / w / u / doors".
6

Thanks! this is really handy - and just at the edge of what I’m cabable of understanding at my current level! :slight_smile: