There are some oddities to what things Inform tells you about in room description details and inventory details for a container.
If it’s closed, we always hear “closed”.
In inventory, we hear about “open” for things that are both open and openable, but we never hear about “open” in room description details.
For perceptibly empty containers (i.e., empty containers that aren’t opaque and closed), we’re always told “empty” in room description details; in inventory, we’re not told about it for these cases:
- transparent, closed, and openable
- opaque, open, not openable
I think those two exceptions for empty constitute a small bug. But I’m having trouble considering what the behavior should be in general.
There’s never an attempt to automatically describe something as transparent or opaque. This is appropriate, 'cause transparency could mean anything from glass to a veil to the bars of a cage. So, being able to see the contents of something doesn’t tell us whether it’s open or closed, and neither openness nor closedness tells us whether we could see contents if they existed. [ edited: oops, openness does tell us we could see contents if they existed, it’s just closedness that doesn’t. But a typical player wouldn’t know to interpret the absence of being told “closed” to necessarily mean “open”. ]
To know all those things without knowing opaque vs. transparent, we’d have to be told all of empty, open, closed (as applicable) all of the time whether the container is openable/closable or not.
But always printing these for containers would create visual clutter, and the room description behavior with details + contents doesn’t look great, e.g.,
You can see lucite case (closed) (in which is a toy) here.
Assuming we’re sticking to parentheticals after the thing’s name, what do you think the behavior should be?
[ Edited to add: ]
I suppose not specifying openness or closedness for unopenable/unclosable things is a sensible default.