Memories II - Who's been visiting MY house then?

So you've built a rather nice fancy Place. You're quite proud of it. You're hoping that people visit and admire it. You find yourself dropping in every time you're near, just to see if anybody has left any comments. And you find yourself happening to be near surprisingly often. Sadly though, there aren't that many comments. Is this because people aren't visiting? Or is it because people are visiting and not saying anything? Wouldn't you love to know? This is a program to let you find out.

This page assumes that you've already got a memory installed in your Place, as detailed in the previous tutorial. If you are unsure about this, then it is recommended that you reread that first.

All you need is one Increment Memory Contraption. As the name suggests, what this does is to take a Memory, and add or subtract a number from it. We will use this to count how many times a guest does something in your room.

Set the parameters to point to the memory that you're using, choose to increment by numbers, specify 1, and then put this in the top line of a program in the first room of your Place. Now next time that you visit your Place, go to Programs - Edit Memories - View Player Records. You'll have a list of everybody who's entered the first room of your house (since you set up the program), together with how many times that they've been in the front room.

Note: What is really being counted here is how many time this guest has done something in your front room. So that the first time a guest comes in, the program fires and your memory will be set to one for them. If they say something, then the program will fire again, and the memory will increase to two. If the guest leaves and re-enters the room or looks at a page the memory will count again.

You'll have probably noticed that the Increment Memory Contraption had the options to increment a Memory not just by a number, but instead by another Memory or a Thought. Incrementing one Memory by another is useful for adding the contents of two Memories together, a situation which may arise on occasion although we won't give an example here. So what is a Thought? Well that's a whole subject in itself, one that will be covered later in the Advanced Techniques section. For the moment I'll just say that it's a sort of short term Memory, and that you don't have to worry about it for the time being.

Extension of the basic idea.

This is a great start. But perhaps you'd like to have an idea about where in your Place that your guest has been. Have they been up to the gallery in the west wing and seen your prized collection of perpetual motion machines? Down to the circus in the garden with it's amazing pogostick dancing rhinos? Where?

To keep an eye on this, put programs with Increment Memory Contraptions in these places as well. There's a cunning trick that you can pull to keep all of this information in one memory. If you want to check on your gallery and your circus as mentioned above, then in your gallery, set the Increment Memory Contraption to increment by 10. In the circus, set your contraption to increment by 100. Now when you View Player Records, you will see for each guest, a number, 238 say. This means that this guest has visited the circus twice, the gallery three times, and your front room eight times.

Note: There is a potential inaccuracy here. If a guest comes in and starts gabbing on in your front room without ever going any deeper, then your memory could read say 12, meaning twelve things done in the front room, rather than gallery visited once and the front room visited twice. Similarly if your guest comes in and out of your Place several times. In practice this shouldn't be too much of a problem. You should have a pretty good idea of what's going on.

Proceed to the next Memories tutorial.
Return to the previous Memories tutorial.
Memories Tutorial Table of Contents
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