Adaptative text for noun synonyms

[ChrisC (Chris Conley)]

Zarf’s post on the topic a few years back is still good advice:

@zarf

Trying to catch normal player commands as a mistake is generally a mistake. You wind up working twice as hard for a result which is half as good.

In this case, you have to be careful to catch every verb synonym (if you added more grammar for “examine”, you’d have to remember to fix each of these mistake declarations). You have to be careful about noun synonyms (this will miss “examine the leaf”, and if you happen to mention green leaves in the room description, the player might try “x green leaf”). And you have to be careful about other verbs (what if the player tries “take leaf” or “feel bark”?)

Then there’s the question of whether the player’s command is really up to printable standards. In Glulx, “X LEAF” will produce the output “You see nothing special about the LEAF,” because the command buffer retains the player’s capitalization. If you include a ten-letter synonym, you may wind up repeating the player’s truncation or misspelling beyond the ninth letter.)

If you really want to be pedantic, complain about the failure to set “it”…

Making two or three individual backdrops is, it winds up, the easy and good solution. (One for “leaves”, one for “branches”.) Or you can make one backdrop with a nice general message about “greenery”.

Basically, if you’re combining a lot of disparate things into one scenery object, the simplest, best solution is either “don’t; break them into separate scenery things” or “make the scenery a very generic, collective mass noun referring to all of them, instead”.

I get that’s not quite what you’re doing here, but the principle is the same. Any time you’re trying to work around or replace the parser machinery in Inform, as you’d need to in this case, you’re probably doing way too much work to accomplish something partial and underwhelming anyway. The easiest solution here then would be to rename the scenery thing to ‘the structure’ or ‘the building’; it’d be fine if both >examine barn and >examine stable resulted in The structure looks warm and inviting., wouldn’t it?