Conditional Text Complication

[severedhand]

@hzdgmg

The second question is, are objects enclosed by the player potentially “in the clearing” or does the program see the player’s inventory as a separate location regardless of what room they are in and the second part of my invalid text is unnecessary.’

You’re encountering a lot of little tricks at once here.

The first is that if clearing is a location and you check if BLAH is in the clearing, that specifically means to Inform that BLAH must be sitting in the clearing. BLAH can’t be in a cupboard in the clearing. It can’t be held by someone in the clearing. The directly enclosing parent of BLAH must be the specified location, if you use the test ‘if BLAH is in LOCATION’.

However, enclosure is a test you can apply to anything. Locations, people, objects, etc.

This means if you want to test if a knife is in the clearing anywhere at all (carried, in a bag, locked in a box that’s invisible… anywhere) you can use a test like

if knife is enclosed by the clearing:

Separately, here’s a cheat sheet I made showing which concepts test what regarding things the player’s holding, carrying, wearing etc.:

Inform's World Model and the Player - cheat sheet

I remember I used to fall foul of using the wrong adjective when I was checking if the player ‘had’ some object about their person in a particular situation. Depending on whether it’s in your inventory, or you’re wearing it, or it’s part of you, or part of something in your inventory, or in a box in a bag… sometimes I’d write code testing for it, and I’d use the wrong test. To this end, I wrote this cheat sheet to nail down which things are where (this’ll make sense when you look at it). I made…

So once you’re on top of that, you may need to look at the boolean logic of what you want. If your sentence with ‘or’ and commas doesn’t work, try expanding it in a really strict way. e.g.

‘if the plate is not enclosed by the clearing and the knife is not enclosed by the clearing and…’ etc.

There’s ultimately probably an easier way to specify the condition you want, but I couldn’t say what it will be yet as I’m not sure what condition you want.

-Wade