(Conditionally) substituting rules in Inform 10?

Authoring Inform 7
1

If I do this in 6M62 it works as expected, but in 10.1.2 neither the standard rule nor the new rule get invoked (no output from wait). Am I doing something wrong? Or is this a known bug?

I was actually doing a conditional substitution, but on simplifying to try and figure out what I was doing wrong it turns out that it fails for me even without the condition. Is there a better way to conditionally replace a standard response?

The Lab is a room.

The flooble rule substitutes for the standard report waiting rule.

This is the flooble rule:
	say "You flooble about aimlessly for a while."
2

I can’t find when this was changed; in 10.1.2 it should be (see next post) This will work in 10.1.2:

The flooble rule is listed instead of the standard report waiting rule in the report waiting rules.

(see WI §19.4 Listing rules explicitly)

As for making it conditional, I’m not sure if/how it can be done all in one line. You can do this:

North of the Lab is Back.

This is the flooble rule:
	if the player is in the Lab:
		say "You flooble about aimlessly for a while.";
	otherwise:
		follow the standard report waiting rule.
		
test me with "z / n / z".
3

Also, I don’t know why your code causes the behavior it does. It should probably not compile at all, since it only seems to de-list the standard rule, without replacing it.

EDIT: The syntax you were originally trying should have worked and is in fact used in ex. 214 - Slogar’s Revenge. This was reported as I7-2142 and fixed for the next release.

4

Yeah, that’s why I was using that syntax; I found it in WI §19.5 Changing the behavior of rules and in that example.

A follow-up question re: listed instead of ... in the ... rulebook – is there an easy way to find the name of the rulebook you want? I found the “standard report waiting rule” via rules on but that doesn’t report the rulebook name AFAICS. I took a quick look in the rules index but that doesn’t seem like it either?

5

I think the best you can do to get the rulebook name is to search for the name of the rule in the Standard Rules (or whatever extension it’s from).

6

Yeah, substitutes for is broken in 10.1.2. It’s been fixed in current dev.

If you use my verbose rules debug log code and wait you’ll get verbose output that includes, nice and neatly:

      [... following report waiting rulebook ]
        [Rule "standard report waiting rule" applies.]
Time passes.

If you look up waiting in the Project Index and then look to the payload of the link that would theoretically copy to your clipboard a code snippet to change the rule response, you can see it has:

The standard report waiting rule response (report waiting rulebook) is "New text".

So you get the rulebook name in parentheses. (Actual pasting to your clipboard seems to be broken there. Oops.)

You can look to the action rules for waiting… but that doesn’t actually give you the rulebook name. You’d have to know that the various rulebook names are Check, Carry out, and Report followed by the exact action name, the thing in that action name’s [...] is an action applying to [...] specification. This is obvious enough in the one or zero noun cases but less so with, e.g., removing it from. (And then the full rulebook name needs rulebook on the end. Or rules. They’re usually interchangeable, but there’s at least one place they’re not and I can never remember it.)