Memories III - Should Auld Acquaintance be Forgot

You want to do something special for frequent visitors. Give them a special area which is locked to more casual guests, and a different entry description. Perhaps as well as this you'd like a different entry description for people who have already visited once (but not yet often enough to be called frequent visitors). Here's how to do this.

Note: When we say “visited” a room, what we are actually counting is how many actions have been performed in the room, (including entering, but not leaving.) So if a guest looks at pages in your room, then this will count as an action. If they start chatting in the room in which this program is set up, then each comment made will count as an action. This might strike you as desirable, after all, somebody who visits and starts chatting can be more welcome than somebody who visits and stays silent so that the only way that you know they've been is by looking at the Player Records for your memories. If this isn't what you want, you only want to know how often somebody has actually entered your room, then there are ways round this, but they require rather more advanced tricks.

Back to the program. We will show two versions of this. One very simple one for people who want to understand what's going on, but are still working on basic (pre-memory) programming, and a second, more complicated version for people who have basic programming under their belt, or who just want to blindly copy something to get a working program. The first version will have just two outcomes, one for friends who have visited eight or more times, and one for more recent guests who have visited less than eight times. The second will be the full thing with a further page for first time visitors.

For the sake of definiteness, you are using a memory called 'MyFirstMemory'.

Decorate you room with the decoration that you want recent guests to see. Build a page and decorate it how you'd like your long time friends to see the room. Make sure that there's a door through to the veteran friends only area, with the Master Settings set to hidden (you'll probably want to slip a Show Door Contraption in a program on the other side so that people can leave again).

On the first line of your program put an Increment Memory Contraption set to increment MyFirstMemory by one. This is where you count how often your guest has entered. On the second line of your program put a Memory Greater Contrivance, with parameters set to ask if MyFirstMemory is greater than seven. On the third line of your program put a Hide Room Description Contraption, a Show Page Contraption (with parameter set to show your 'Long Time Friends page) and a Show Door Contraption (with parameter set to show the door to the veteran friends only area).

There you go.

First build two pages off your room. Decorate the main room with the decoration that you want your veteran (eight times or more) friends to see. Then decorate your two pages with whatever you want first time visitors to see and what you want acquaintances to see. Also makes sure that there's a door leading to your special 'friends only' area. Leave the master setting to have this showing.

On the first row of your program, put an Increment Memory Contraption set to increment MyFirstMemory by one. This is what counts how many times the guest has entered. Next to this put a Memory Lesser Contrivance set to ask if MyFirstMemory is less than eight. Make sure that the Program Control Knob is set to All Pass, the Increment Memory Contraption automatically passes, so we want this line to pass whenever both gadgets pass.

In the second line, put a Hide Room Description Contraption and a Hide Door Contraption (set to the door through to the friends area, this door should not be visible to anybody who hasn't visited eight times). Next to these place a Memory Equal Contrivance set to ask if MyFirstMemory is equal to one. Again, set to All Pass. In the Escape Hatch put a Show Page set to show the page for acquaintances, the one for guests who have been here before, but not eight times.

In the bottom row, put a Show Page Contraption pointing to the page for first time visitors.

Proceed to the next Memories tutorial.
Return to the previous Memories tutorial.
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