Capitalizing room titles

[pbparjeter]

I’m trying to always capitalize room titles in my Inform 7 game.

I would expect that it would be something like this:

Rule for printing the name of a room: say "[the player's capitalised surroundings]".

But I have two issues. First, I can’t get “[the player’s capitalised surroundings]” to work in any situation even though it is in the Inform 7 manual.

Second, this just freezes the game when I try it without ‘capitalised’:

Rule for printing the name of a room: say "[the player's surroundings]".

This works though

Rule for printing the name of a room: say "this placeholder text".

[AmandaB]

I recently had similar questions. Here’s that thread:

Capitalization and Location

Hey all- Today’s frustration is: I want to be able to change a location’s name from being capitalized to uncapitalized when the location is mentioned in the text of the game, and the documentation has not been helpful. I want to do something like this: Left-from-place is an object that varies. Carry out doing a thing: say "A magical door appears in [the uncapitalised location]!"; now the left-from-place is the location; move the magical door to left-from-place. But that doesn’t work, of…

Hope this helps. And you’re totally in my club now!

[pbparjeter]

Haha, thank you. I googled but did not find that thread.

Edit: I don’t think that actually solves my problem. I think you are trying to print the room name in the description, which I was able to do. I am trying to modify the bold header itself.

However the extension there by Nathan Nerode does what I need I think. I am not sure how to install it in Borogove (the web interface) though and I expect there is a more straightforward way.

[zarf (Andrew Plotkin)]

Normally you’d just define the room names capitalized to begin with. What’s the situation in which you want to print them in lower case?

[pbparjeter]

Yes, that works, but sometimes I move things around in the story and then the uncapitalised variation is the first time that room appears in the source code.

I have found a solution though in another thread and adapted it for my purposes:

Rule for printing the name of a room (called the chosen room):
say the printed name of the chosen room in title case.

[zarf (Andrew Plotkin)]

If you say

The printed name of the Blue Grotto is "Blue Grotto".

…then it doesn’t matter what order the source is in.

[pbparjeter]

Hmm, I guess that is better if I decide to go back and change room titles.

[HanonO (Hanon Ondricek)]

Yes, I’ve done that before - if you write a reference to a room in lower-case before you define it, Inform will take the first mention in source-code order as the printed name. Such as:

Living room is a room. "It's a living (room)." South of Living Room is kitchen.

Kitchen is a room. The description is "It's a kitchen."

In this case, the printed names as first mentioned will be “Living room” and “kitchen” even though I’ve capitalized Kitchen when I define it and Living Room later.