In my recent game Fireboat, I had a problem with disappearing room descriptions.
One “puzzle” had the player character move from a trawler back to the aft deck of the fireboat using the following segment of code:
//
give player defused;
move player to AftDeck;
//
The PC is moved to the after deck as expected. However, the AftDeck room description is not displayed until the PC is moved to another room and then back to the aftdeck.
I was unable to fix this bug and had to publish the game for Ectocomp.
ETA: (moving the player between rooms is a complicated matter. move X to doesn’t take a lot of this matter into account: that’s why you must use PlayerTo(). )
For complicated reasons (mostly to do with earlier versions of Inform and earlier versions of the Z-machine), the player’s location is not just stored as parent(player) but as a separate global called location. If these get out of sync, weird stuff happens.
(It’s partially because Z3 wants the location to always be stored in a global, and partially because it requires extra opcodes to look up the parent of the player compared to using a register, and partially because “I want the room the player’s in, not the object they’re in” is a very commonly-needed operation so it’s faster not to delegate it to a separate routine.)
So when moving the player, as Marco says, best to use PlayerTo(), which makes sure to keep them in sync, and also handles logistics like printing room descriptions and such.
