Conversation Package, Eric Eve (I6L02)

Authoring Inform 7
1

Hello people.

Is it possible that one can’t possibly “quiz” actors about backdrops?
I didn’t find relevant info about this and I’m a bit puzzled.

This is my code (Doc is a male person etc…):

[code]The Pack river is a backdrop. It is in Brook and Brook_Two and Backyard. Understand “brook/creek/water/worm/dark/waters/stream” as the river. The description is “A dark worm rolling powerfully into the black of the night. I wouldn’t dare enter its waters.”

After quizzing Doc about Pack river:
say “‘Is this the Pack River, Doc?’ I ask.[paragraph break]‘Indeed. The part that has not been cut through the [BT]forest[RT], I mean.’”.[/code]
If so, how can I “simply” correct it? I’m not in the mood for making a subject out of every single backdrop element.

Thanks in advance.

2

Bumpy :slight_smile:

3

The problem here is that Epistemology isn’t marking backdrops as seen. There’s a couple of ways you can fix this in your own code.

If you’re happy to have the player character know about all your backdrops at the start of the game, you can write:

a backdrop is usually familiar.

If you don’t want the player to know of the existence of a backdrop until s/he’s seen it you can instead add the following rule to your game:

carry out looking (this is the note backdrops rule):
   now every backdrop in the location is seen.

The latter (or something like it) is probably the fix that should go into Epistemology.

Odd that this has never come up before!

4

Odd is that such a simple solution hadn’t come to my mind without me having to bugger people.

Oh, now that I think about it… Not that odd at all.

Thanks Eric. I think I will append the second part to the game or the extension itself. Hope this served you as well.

PS: i love the conversation extensions you made

5

mmmmh… Again, I’m in need.

Is there a way to automatically remove topics from the suggestions after one quip has been answered?

I tried something like this:

Before quizzing someone about something (called the exp_ired), say "[remove exp_ired ask suggestion]".

but, if we directly quiz or ask (without typing SAY HELLO or TALK TO) it gives a run-time error (*** Run-time problem P31: Attempt to use a property of the ‘nothing’ non-object: property ask-suggestions).

As a side note, I used a Before rule because the After rule doesn’t seem to trigger, I guess because of specific quizzing on characters overriding the general one.

6

Getting around implicit greeting without breaking the system is tricky business. I’ve been working with Chris Conley’s Threaded Conversation extension quite a bit, and your request seems to fall under his plausibility rules. Maybe you can check out his extension and see if there’s a way to pare some of the ideas into something simpler that works for your game.

7

My suggestion is that the interlocutor be checked every turn and set to null if they are in a different room than the player. I know it’s easy to add, and I do lots of moving the player manually.

8

Try this:

Before quizzing someone about something:
	now the current interlocutor is the noun;
	say "[remove second noun ask suggestion]".
9

Perfect. This worked pretty well.

So, I figure out that the “nothing” the interpreter was referring to was not a subject (topic) but true very interlocutor? So I guess he/she is addressed after the before rule…