asked-or-told oversight in Eric Eve's Conversation Responses

Authoring Inform 7
1

I am using Eric Eve’s Conversation Responses (and it’s prerequisites). For convenience I took advantage of the asked-or-told response rules, thusly:

Response of Grandpa when asked-or-told about jam: say "'Your Honey and Aunt Mary make the best blackberry jam in the whole world,' Grandpa smiles. 'Or at least I think so.'".

In some cases, I’ve separated out the asked and told code:

Response of Grandpa when asked about train tracks: say "'Yeah? The one that runs by the trailer park? You can hear it going by if you listen,' Grandpa says.".

There is a concept of implicit-asking, when the player does not specify who they are talking to, but there is a character who is the “current interlocutor.”

>ask about train tracks [implicit-quizzing the train tracks] [(1) quizzing Grandpa about the train tracks] "Yeah? The one that runs by the trailer park? You can hear it going by if you listen," Grandpa says. [(1) quizzing Grandpa about the train tracks - succeeded]

However, while explicitly asking triggers the asked-or-told rules, implicit-asking does not (it triggers the conversational defaults I’ve defined elsewhere):

[code]>ask grandpa about jam
[quizzing Grandpa about the jam jars]
“Your Honey and Aunt Mary make the best blackberry jam in the whole world,” Grandpa smiles. “Or at least I think so.”
[quizzing Grandpa about the jam jars - succeeded]

ask about jam
[implicit-quizzing the jam jars]
“Hm, good question, Peanut,” Grandpa shrugs.
[implicit-quizzing the jam jars - failed][/code]

Is that intentional? Whether it is or isn’t, is there an elegant way to work around it?

I was thinking of asking Eric since it seemed like a bug, but thought I would put it past y’all first.

Wes

2

I didn’t get this problem when I tried it just now. Is there something else in your code that might be causing it?

My test program was as follows:

"Test"

Include Conversation Package by Eric Eve.

jam is a subject.

The Lounge is a Room.

Grandpa is a man in the Lounge.

Response of Grandpa when asked-or-told about jam:
   say "'Your Honey and Aunt Mary make the best blackberry jam in the whole world,' Grandpa smiles. 'Or at least I think so.'".
   
Default ask response for Grandpa:
   say "'Hm, good question, Peanut,' Grandpa shrugs."

And this generated the transcript:

Test
An Interactive Fiction
Release 1 / Serial number 121225 / Inform 7 build 6G60 (I6/v6.32 lib 6/12N) SD

Lounge
You can see Grandpa here.

>ask grandpa about jam
"Your Honey and Aunt Mary make the best blackberry jam in the whole world," Grandpa smiles. "Or at least I think so."

>a jam
"Your Honey and Aunt Mary make the best blackberry jam in the whole world," Grandpa smiles. "Or at least I think so."

>t jam
"Your Honey and Aunt Mary make the best blackberry jam in the whole world," Grandpa smiles. "Or at least I think so."

>ask about jam
"Your Honey and Aunt Mary make the best blackberry jam in the whole world," Grandpa smiles. "Or at least I think so."

>a rail
"Hm, good question, Peanut," Grandpa shrugs.

Without knowing more about what else is in your game code I don’t know what else to suggest. Are you using Conversational Defaults to provide Grandpa’s default response as here or are you doing something different? If you can’t find a solution perhaps you could post the problematic section of your code here for other people to have a look at.

3

Fascinating. I wonder how I might do a trace or some kind of debug to effectively see what might be interfering with implicit-asking and implicit-telling.

My version of conversation defaults and conversation responses is relatively recent, maybe a month old.

Any suggestions?

I’ll try a bit with rules and actions reporting turned on.

… Oh goodness. I was going to paste in a transcript here, but it is a mess. Lots of “every turn rules” and “procedural rules” and other stuff.

I need to clean some of that up first, then see if I have an actual problem.

When I was first starting to write, someone handed me Strunk & White’s Elements of Style. I wish there was an Inform 7 Elements of Programming Style. After all, there are many ways to accomplish the same thing, and some methods have fewer consequences than others. Particularly as you start doing complicated things with NPC actions and complicated series of actions.

Wes