Hints - Overview
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If you want to add a context-sensitive hints system to your game, it's probably a lot of work, but at least the TADS 3 library does what it can to help by providing a set of classes to ease the coding of a menu-based hint system. Basically, all you need to do is to set up a menu tree that, in outline, might look something like this:

TopHintMenu 'Hints';

HintMenu 'Cave Region';

++ Goal 'How do I...?' ['Have you tried...?'];

++ Goal ...

++ Goal ...
+++ Hint ..

++ Goal

+ HintMenu 'The Ship'

++ Goal
....

This is probably best done in a source file of its own - say hints.t - which you keep separate from the rest of your game code. You may need to add a few things to the game proper for your hints system to pick up on, but otherwise your hints system should not change anything in the game proper, and certainly nothing in hints.t (or whatever you choose to call it) should change anything in the game state at all. Apart from the availability of hints the game should compile and play just the same whether you include hints.t in the build or not.

What the hint system aims to do is to provide a successive list of hints for each of the various goals that the player might be pursuing at any particular point in the game, but not to list any goals that have not yet become relevant or have ceased to be relevant. These goals may optionally be organized in submenus under the main hints menu to aid navigation through the hint system for the player. How this all works in detail, we shall now explore, though it must be emphasized from the outset that the aim here is merely to give enough examples for you to see how the hint system works, not to try to provide a complete set of hints for the game we have created, which would be far too large a task to complete here.