Room Description Headings

version 1/090620 by Erwin Genstein

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    Chapter: About This Extension

    Section: Introduction

    The room description heading customarily consists of the name of the room, in bold type. If the player is enclosed by something, which we'll call the player's enclosure, it is usually printed afterwards in parentheses as in " (on the chair)". If that thing, in turn, is enclosed by something, it appears next; and so on.

    This list can be hard to control, since it is composed by the standard rules' "room description heading rule" and its component parts are handed by issuing library messages (library message looking action number 8, to be more specific). This extension allows this list to be augmented, reformatted or suppressed entirely; it also allows similar text to be displayed when the player is not enclosed by anything (other than the location), or when the player is in darkness. It does so through a series of activities which are perhaps more intuitively named and easier to control.

    This extension uses the following terminology.

        Enclosure - some thing which encloses something else.

        The player's enclosure - the thing which most immediately encloses the player, be that an object or the location.

        The player's enclosure ancestry - the list of things which enclose the player's enclosure, if any.

        Enclosure description - an item in the list which follows the room name in the room description heading, such as in "Bedroom (on the chair) (on the table)".