I’m getting very frustrated by two things.
Firstly, doing something as simple as “say hello to Barry”. Now, if I type this in the story, the default message “There is no reply” appears. If I try it on an inanimate object, then it tells me I can only do it to animate objects. Both of those indicate that it’s understanding the phrase I’m typing, and “say” as a verb.
However, I want to put some simple instructions in my code so that Barry will respond if I “say hello to Barry”. But I can’t work out how to do this. Everything I try throws up error messages and won’t run. I initially thought something like:
After saying “hello” to Barry:
say "Barry replies, ‘Hi there’ "
would work, but it doesn’t. I have implemented some of the example code for “talking to”, which works fine. This is it:
Understand “talk to [someone]” as talking to. Understand “talk to [something]” as talking to. Talking to is an action applying to one visible thing.
After talking to Barry:
say “He scowls and says, ‘Haven’t you got something better to be doing?’”
I have tried to modify that for “saying” but it just gets confused. I have scoured the documentation, but the phrase “say hello” doesn’t appear in it at all. Additionally, most of the entries that mention “say” are talking about it in a command sense to print text in the story. So I’m a bit stuck on how to make “say” a usable verb.
The second thing I’m stuck on refers to Polly the parrot from my last post. Parrots, as you will appreciate, can be both carried and spoken to. However, if I define Polly as an animal, I cannot carry her. If I do not define her as an animal, I cannot use any of the speech commands (except, strangely, the “talk to” code above, which works perfectly on inanimate objects for some reason, but only allows me one response.) I am aware that there is an extension that allows conversation with inanimate objects, but I’d rather Polly was properly defined, but is there some method of carrying animals? Interestingly, defining Polly as “can be carried” seems to be acceptable code, but it doesn’t actually work.