Greetings,

If this is the wrong forum for this topic, then please move it.

I was wondering if anyone could give me some guidance when it comes to having multiple cites in a text adventure game. I found this example from Google searching, and it's sort of what I have in mind. My problem is moving between cities and then in code, checking if the user as reached the next city.

I guess it depends on how I'm going to design my cites. What I had in mind was that City would be a class, like this:

public class City
{
   private List<GameObject> buildings;
   private List<Character> people;
   private string cityName = String.Empty;
   
  public City()
  {
     cityName = "My New City"
     buildings = new List<GameObject>();
     //code to load buildings list
     people = new List<Character>();
     //code to load Character list
  }
  public void start() {}
  public void checkAction() {}
  public bool ismissionCompleted () {}
}

Am I sort of on the right track when thinking about my cites and how to move around? Is there a better way for looking at it?

The search term to use is 'interactive fiction' eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction which is bigger than just text adventures.

I wonder why you have cities, what's their purpose?

In other words, if you'd make a big flat world consisting of connected rooms, and you label a few rooms as "in city X", and a few others as "in city Y". Would that work?

Is there anything special that must be maintained "city-wide" ? (labeling could take the form of a reference of a pointer to a city object of course)

If you have only cities (or you see "outside the cities" also as a special city), you could think of cities as "levels" where the player could move between.

The great trick in games is often that you put up a lot of smoke and mirrors to make the player believe something, while in reality, you do something much simpler. Don't be afraid to step outside what the real world does, if it serves your purpose. The judgement of a game is in the end always on what the player perceives, and not how you accurate your implementation represents the real world.

The search term to use is 'interactive fiction' eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction which is bigger than just text adventures.

I wonder why you have cities, what's their purpose?

In other words, if you'd make a big flat world consisting of connected rooms, and you label a few rooms as "in city X", and a few others as "in city Y". Would that work?

Is there anything special that must be maintained "city-wide" ? (labeling could take the form of a reference of a pointer to a city object of course)

If you have only cities (or you see "outside the cities" also as a special city), you could think of cities as "levels" where the player could move between.

The great trick in games is often that you put up a lot of smoke and mirrors to make the player believe something, while in reality, you do something much simpler. Don't be afraid to step outside what the real world does, if it serves your purpose. The judgement of a game is in the end always on what the player perceives, and not how you accurate your implementation represents the real world.

What I want to do is essentially have the player move around the city by typing in commands, for example, if they enter a small medieval city with a tavern, a castle in the distance, hidden dungeons, towns people, and objects (trees, swords, shields,etc...) ,

So let say there at the entrance, at the prompt, they can type enter city name, in my game, they can view a map, by type view map. The player decided to go to the tavern, so they type enter tavern, and from there they can chat with NPCs, and so forth, and the NPCs will be a character object in code, rather than just a string.

My main problem was how to structure moving from one city to the next and checking if the player has successfully reached the next city. This afternoon, I got the idea to use a method and take the players current location based on how many (go north, souths) they've typed and calculate the distance the city.

Ah right, missed that question somewhat.

If you know whether you are in or out of a city (it would be weird to ask a distance while you are already in the city), you could run a pathfinder from the current location of the player to eg an entrance of the city. That gives you a distance, and even a full path.

Your idea may fail if the player walks a few circles??

Ah right, missed that question somewhat.

If you know whether you are in or out of a city (it would be weird to ask a distance while you are already in the city), you could run a pathfinder from the current location of the player to eg an entrance of the city. That gives you a distance, and even a full path.

Your idea may fail if the player walks a few circles??

I don't understand the walk in circles part, could you elaborate a little more?

I got the idea to use a method and take the players current location based on how many (go north, souths) they've typed and calculate the distance the city.

For example the following layout

[attachment=30985:citiesABC.png]

Since you can walk a circle (where you have more south than north) your N/S count can be disturbed.

Oh, while typing the above I came up with another item. Suppose I want to go from A to C (without walking a circle). If you subtract number of North from number of South moves, then just 1 N out of city A is the same as 2N (E), and then 1S (2N-1S == 1N). In the latter case you are in the city you wanted to be

I'm seconding: TA as well as IF are based on "rooms". The player characters is ever in exactly one room. Such a room has a couple of exits. A command like "go north" actually tells the system to look whether the current room provides an exit that is tagged "north". If not, then going north is obviously not possible. Otherwise the exit's reference to the following room is extracted and the current room is set to that reference.

Notice that rooms in this sense are not necessarily physical. For example, a forest clearing may be room, and a lonely tree in its center can be a room, too. Hence, after entering the room "forest clearing", you can command "go tree" to go closer the tree, although within the system logic the player enters another room.

Although (AFAIK) not necessarily usual in old school games, exits can link to distant rooms. You can use a zone concept so that a zone adds exits to all rooms in that zone, without adding that exit to each rooms explicitly. Such zones should be used for long distant travels, of course.

I personally prefer an exit not to link to another room directly, but to an explicit entree of that room. This gives a nice possibility to distinguish from where the player enters the room, e.g. to run different actions.