Adaptive responses when story is not in present tense

Authoring Inform 7
1

When the game is not in present tense, are all the standard responses supposed to change tense too?

When the story is set to past tense, it looks like “You can’t see any such thing” changes to past tense, but “There are none at all available” stays in present tense. Is this a reportable bug?

2

Sounds reportable to me! There are some meta responses that are deliberately (I presume) not adapted, like “At the moment [pronoun] means [whatever],” or “You can’t ‘undo’ what hasn’t been done,” but those are out of world. “There are not at all available!” describes an in-world situation so it ought to be adaptive… in fact its behavior is inconsistent with parser error internal rule response (Q):

"[if number understood is 0]None[otherwise]Only [number understood][end if] of those [are] available."

I can’t figure out how to trigger this response, though.

3

I would also say that parser error internal rule response (M):

"You can only do that to something animate."

should be adaptive. It’s the PC who’s trying to kiss a door, not the player.

I don’t know if this has been reported, but basic visibility rule response (A):

"It is pitch dark, and you can't see a thing."

absolutely should be adaptive–maybe this wasn’t caught because no one uses darkness anymore.

OK, this is enough that I’ll try to catch them all and file the report myself.

4

Thanks!

5

You’re welcome! Bug report here. As an experienced author, I expect you know how to fix this by changing the rule response, but I’ll leave it here for anyone looking:

When play begins: now parser nothing error internal rule response (B) is "There [are] none at all available!"

Hmm, this produces “There was none at all available!” which seems undesirable.

6

There are buttons in the rules section of the index that will insert the response text for you to modify. It’s so much easier to do now.

7

Nice! I had not known that.

Is there a way to get it to work for things that are really deep in the internals like the parser nothing error responses?

8

Those internal rules (like the parser error internal rule) are not listed in the index, so there’s no button for them.

You can still say

The parser error internal rule response (X) is “Gesundheit.”.

(for the “I beg your pardon” error, for example).

9

And the originals are listed nicely in the Standard Rules, in the section where it defines the I6 correspondences for those rules.