Topics

Virtually all the classes we have encountered so far are for implementing physical objects that appear in the game world, such as rooms, door, keys and things. Under certain circumstances, though, such as conversation, or thinking about things, or looking things up, we may need to refer to abstractions such as democracy, or the weather, or quantum mechanics. Under the same circumstances we may also want to refer to people or objects that aren't actually implemented in our game, such as Napoleon Bonaparte, or the planet Jupiter, or even Aunt Maude's necklace if it's simply a topic of conversation and never makes a physical appearance in the game. For these purposes we can define a Topic:

tBonaparte: Topic 'Napoleon[n] Bonaparte';
tJupiter: Topic 'Jupiter';
tNecklace: Topic '() Aunt Maude\'s necklace';

Note that the property we are defining in the Topic template is the vocab property, which works in precisely the same way as it does for Thing (both Thing and Topic inherit the way vocab works from LMentionable). Amongst other things this means that by defining this property we are also defining the name property of the Topic (and with it, theName, aName, etc.). In the adv3Lite library these properties can sometimes be useful, as we shall see. It is therefore a good idea to define the vocab property of a Topic in just the same way as you would a Thing.

Note also that we gave each of our Topic objects a name beginning with t. We don't have to do this, but it can be useful to employ some such convention (other authors sometimes use 'top' rather than just 't') to readily distinguish Topics from objects representing Things.

We have yet to encounter a situation where a Topic is actually useful, since the parts of the library that actually make use of Topics are all in the optional modules. Topic itself needs to be in the core library, however, so that the parser understands how to deal with a Topic, and so that actions that work with Topics can be defined in the core modules action.t and actions.t. There's a couple of general points it's useful to know about how the core library deals with Topics, since these apply throughout the library:

• A Topic is considered in scope for a command that expects a topic if the topic is known to the player character (i.e., if its isFamiliar property is true).
• When the parser is looking for a Topic, it may also match a Thing (this makes sense since the player may want to talk or think about game objects as well as abstract concepts or things that aren't in the game). A Thing is likewise in scope for matching as a Topic when the player character knows about it.

By default, all Topics start out familiar. This is probably the more common case, since the kinds of thing implemented as Topics tend to be the kinds of thing people will have heard of (the weather, democracy or Napoleon Bonaparte for example). But it may not always be the case; the player character may not know of Aunt Maude's necklace, for example, until someone mentions it in conversation. In that case we would want to start out with the tNecklace object having its familiar property set to nil. The quick way to do that is through the Topic template, for which the second, optional, element, defined with an @ sign, defines the value of the familiar property:

tNecklace: Topic '() Aunt Maude\'s necklace' @nil;