Content of containers and It in Inform 6.42

Authoring Inform 6
1

Hello,

Working on my game using the standard library 6.42, I noticed rather confusing behaviour. I had implemented a cupboard drawer as a container and placed cutlery as an object in it. When the drawer was open, I can interact freely with the cutlery, however, ‘it’ is never set to cutlery, but rather keeps the value it had before.

so, the sequence

OPEN DRAWER. EXAMINE CUTLERY. TAKE IT

Will not result in trying to take the cutlery, but rather taking the drawer. Similarly,

OPEN DRAWER.EXAMINE COINS. EXAMINE CUTLERY. TAKE IT.

will result in taking the coins lying on the table rather than the cutlery.

Personally, I find this counter-intuitive. Is there any way to change that without rewriting parts of the library?

Yours,
Deathworks

2

That should work. Check that you haven’t given the cutlery pluralname. You can always type PRONOUNS to see what objects are currently associated with him, her, it and them. (At least I think this is in the standard library.)

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3

Hello!

Oohhh. Pluralname … of course. In my mind, I was back in the 80s at my C64 playing non-Infocom adventures where IT didn’t care about plural or singular.

Thanks for helping me.

Yours,
Deathworks

Edit: Yes, the cutlery is ‘THEM’ :see_no_evil_monkey:

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