Best practices for creating understand statements for describing scenery objects

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Hi all,

See title. Thoughts?

Picking out the nouns is the easy part, if players would only use nouns to refer to things it would be trivial to create understand statements. But if descriptions include not only nouns (as is the usual case), is there a good way to handle that?

The easiest thing I could think of is to create an understand statement including all these words. But then the player can refer to e.g. the s-temple as “the” or “of” if I have an understand statement like:

Understand "the/temple/of/doom" as the s-temple.

My initial thought was to just do

Understand "temple" as the s-temple.

But then the parser gives me errors if the player includes any other words.

Is there some way to understand things by their noun only (avoiding disambiguation questions) and somehow strip all words which are not relevant?

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2

There are better experts who can tell you cool answers.

My usual trick is to say Understand "temple" or "temple of" or "doom" as the s-temple.

I know you can use the backslashes but I find this pretty readable. ‘The’ doesn’t matter at all and can be omitted.

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I usually do something like:

Understand "temple" or "doom" or "temple of doom" as the s-temple.
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4

In terms of effect The temple of doom is a thing is equivalent to:

The temple of doom is a privately-named thing.
Understand "temple/of/doom" as the temple of doom.

(effect, not internal representation; pace @drpeterbatesuk. :grin: )

I’d say “temple/of/doom” is most appropriate. You’re not making anything any worse than the norm by creating a case in which “of” can refer to something; as you’ve noted, the effect of leaving it out is worse.

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5

I guess only beta testers will try stuff like

>x the
examine what?
>x of
The Temple of Doooooooom!

Thanks for the feedback all!

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6

Same here.

For what it’s worth, I find these lines easier to read with commas:

Understand "temple", "temple of", "doom" as the s-temple.
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7

You can also do something like:

Understand "the/-- temple of/-- doom/--" as the s-temple.

Which will avoid lots of things with “the” in their names getting triggered by “x the”. Essentially, it makes the “the/–” parts adjectives rather than the core noun.

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8

You don’t need to include articles. The parser will ignore any number of any articles preceding the words in a command that identify an object.

foo-kind is a kind of object.
foo is a foo-kind.
understand "foo" as foo.
understand "examine [any foo-kind]" as examining.

>x the a a an the an an foo

You see nothing special about foo.

(I used a new kind of object just to drive home the point that it applies to objects in general, not just to things.)

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9

I thought that too, but then I tried it and it didn’t work.

Turns out I had the object in the wrong room :upside_down_face: so that’s why I couldn’t examine it. Teach me to write code before breakfast.

I was starting to think I had a few dozen Understand … as phrases to change, so that’s a relief.

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