# Intermediate Directions and Movement

Relative directions rotate along with their pattern

    [ > Player | Crate ] -> [ > Player | > Crate]

gets compiled to the following set of rules:

    UP [ UP player | crate ] -> [ UP player | UP crate ]
    DOWN [ DOWN player | crate ] -> [ DOWN player | DOWN crate ]
    LEFT [ LEFT player | crate ] -> [ LEFT player | LEFT crate ]
    RIGHT [ RIGHT player | crate ] -> [ RIGHT player | RIGHT crate ]

You can restrict patterns so that they're only matched in a particular direction (by default, when the interpreter tries to find places to apply to rule, it tries all four rotations of it). To implement gravity, we could do

    DOWN [ stationary Object ] -> [ > Object ]

Which compiles to

    DOWN [ stationary Object ] -> [ DOWN Object ]

It would probably have been simpler to write the rule as

    [ stationary Object ] -> [ DOWN Object ]

which is the same thing.

Another good illustration of why rule direction might be important would be if you're making a word game.

    [ C | A | T ] -> WIN

would look for words in all four directions, so TAC would also match this rule. To fix it, you would restrict the rule to read left-to-right as follows:

     Editright [ C | A | T ] -> WIN

Huzzah!

There are horizontal directons as well - if you want something that moves horizontally when you move horizontally, but ignores you otherwise, you do this

    [ Horizontal  Player ] [ Crate ] -> [  Horizontal  Player ] [  Horizontal Crate  ]

and get this:

(Vertical is also a keyword that you can use).

Vertical and horizontal are both keywords, but is there a way of reducing the following to a single instruction?

    [ ^ Player | Crate ] -> [ ^ Player | ^ Crate ]
    [ v Player | Crate ] -> [ v Player | v Crate ]

There is, and it's this:

    [ Perpendicular Player | Crate ] -> [ Perpendicular Player | Perpendicular Crate ]

Parallel is also a keyword, and means what you think it might :)

Finally, viewdir is a special direction keyword which limits the rule to the direction the camera is facing. This could be useful if you wanted the player object to interact with the tile in front of them.

Tip: if you don't know what something does in the examples (or in your own code :S ), add the debug statement to the prelude and see what it produces.