Alright, so I’m pretty new to TADS 3, but I have found Eric Eve’s TADS 3 Tour Guide pretty helpful so far. There’s one thing that I just can’t find in any documentation, however, and that’s how to get travel messages to work the way you want them to.
My problem is that I want a little description for traveling between pretty much all the rooms so that it doesn’t feel like your character is just teleporting between rooms, but I also want an accompanying npc to be able to travel with you. When I set a sayDeparting message for the npc, it says something like “Bob trails along behind you. You follow the dirt road into the forest.” instead of "You follow the dirt road into the forest. Bob trails along behind you. " which makes much more sense to me. I figured that this is what sayArriving would do, so I tried it only to find that sayArriving does not appear to do anything no matter where I travel or what I do. Am I missing something about travelMessages or ActorStates?
In a similar vein, I can’t figure out how to make enterables and doors work with accompanying npcs when I want a message to be displayed to narrate the room transition (similar to a TravelMessage). I previously overrode the dobjFor(TravelVia) method with a double quoted string containing my message (followed by inherited(); of course), but this caused the message to print twice, once when the pc travels through the door and once when the npc travels through it.
I’m pretty stuck right now and have been working on this for over five hours, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!