I’m sure this is something very basic, but it’s driving me crazy.
[code]“BinocTest” by Me
The laboratory is a room. A microscope slide is in the laboratory. An open container called a binocular microscope is in the laboratory.
Does the player mean doing something with the binocular microscope: It is likely.
[/code]
The intention is that, when a player types a command refers to the microscope, the game should interpret that as a reference to the binocular microscope and not to the microscope slide. However, when I get the slide and then type “put slide in microscope” it thinks I’m trying to put the slide into itself.
I thought that perhaps the slide was getting some “extra credit” because it is held by the player and therefore takes precedence over non-held items; to counteract this I tried bumping the priority of the binocular microscope up to “very likely” and adding an “unlikely” statement to doing something with the binocular slide. Same problem.
I think the confusion comes from having the same word as both noun and adjective. Maybe it’s a special case that needs to be looked at by the developers.
I played around using your terms, but I couldn’t find a solution.
My personal preference would be to rename the slide to “glass slide”. But… that’s just sidestepping the issue.
Well, maybe someone with a better understanding of disambiguation will see this.
Thanks to all. I wound up using Matt’s suggestion as the path of least resistance. It’s an easy fix to the most immediate aspect of the problem (although there may still be other things that the player might try with the 'scope that could be misunderstood if he has already picked up the slide). Jon’s extension seems like a more complete solution, but I’m already trying to learn a few new (for me) extensions in connection with this project and am trying to keep the learning curve at a manageable level.
