does the player mean consulting it about

[zarf (Andrew Plotkin)]

Using a scoring activity as you suggest would be more flexible, yes. (But also slower, as the system would have to invoke an activity – three rulebooks – rather than one.)

[jacksonmead]

So I know you (the OP) found a solution that works for you, and the discussion has moved somewhat away from this, but what about the workaround of just having consulting it about actions on the book stand call consulting it about on the encyclopedia? You never (I assume) want to consult the book stand about anything.

-Kevin

[capmikee]

@jacksonmead

So I know you (the OP) found a solution that works for you, and the discussion has moved somewhat away from this, but what about the workaround of just having consulting it about actions on the book stand call consulting it about on the encyclopedia? You never (I assume) want to consult the book stand about anything.

I don’t recall if consulting it about requires a held object, but I’ve been discovering more and more problems with redirecting actions to a different noun. Occasionally, you’ll run into something like this:

consult book about frobnitz
(consulting the book stand about)
You must be holding the dusty book to consult it about something.

In this case it might work, because you’re confined to a single action, but if you want to redirect lots of actions, it gets really messy. Another alternative I’ve tried:

Before doing anything other than examining with the book stand: now the noun is the dusty book

…runs into more problems, because rules that run before it and rules that run after it are dealing with different nouns - you don’t always get the full complement of action checks that you would expect with a “try”… but I think to use “try” in such a case you need to do some magic with stored actions.

It’s usually preferable to have the parser choose the right object in the first place.

[capmikee]

@zarf

It’s not normally the case that only one rule decides the disambiguation outcome. The rulebook is run separately for each option (perhaps after the parser has pre-eliminated some options). Each option gets a score, and the option with the highest score wins.

Only one rule fires for each option. But it is (or can be) a different rule for each of the options.

Thanks for explaining that. Sometimes I wish the “rules” command had an option to tell you the object or action that the rulebook is operating on…

[Ron_Newcomb]

@capmikee

One day, one day I tell you, I’m going to rewrite that damn parser and expose all of its workings to I7!

I think I’ll try doing that this week. Not really with the intention that you’d really want to use it (as I’m pretty sure it will be slower than i6) but just as a learning/teaching tool. Besides, I made some really cool new Understand tokens and I’d like to show off how powerful the parser can be.

[capmikee]

@Ron Newcomb

I think I’ll try doing that this week. Not really with the intention that you’d really want to use it (as I’m pretty sure it will be slower than i6) but just as a learning/teaching tool. Besides, I made some really cool new Understand tokens and I’d like to show off how powerful the parser can be.

Throw in some Scope Caching and it might not end up too slow…

New extension: Scope Caching

I’ve had this lying around for a while, ever since Zarf explained how to do it. But I came up with a situation where I actually had to use it, so I thought it was time to write some documentation and flesh it out a little. eyeballsun.org/i/Scope%20Caching.i7x Please have a look at it. I would happily take advice on improving the lame example. But about that example… I’m not 100% sure why this happens, but if I don’t use Scope Caching, this gets stuck in an infinite loop: [code]Indoors is a …

Feel free to suggest changes or bugfixes for Scope Caching… it’s still in beta!

[NYKevin]

Someone asked why I didn’t simply redirect consulting actions from the stand to the encyclopedia. The answer is that I could, but then I’d also need to fix this:

CONSULT BOOK ABOUT FOO
(the book stand)
You discover nothing of interest in the encyclopedia.

That involves not only suppressing the “(the book stand)”, but also putting in a “(the encyclopedia)” to replace it. I simply felt it was not worth the effort.

EDIT:The bug in question. Apparently I’m not the first person to run into this…

[Felix_Larsson]

@NYKevin

to fix this:

CONSULT BOOK ABOUT FOO
(the book stand)
You discover nothing of interest in the encyclopedia.

That involves not only suppressing the “(the book stand)”, but also putting in a “(the encyclopedia)” to replace it.

Actually, that is not at all simple. You’d think you’d only have to write a rule for clarifying the parser’s choice of the book stand unders certain conditions (or a rule for printing the name of while clarifying … etc.). But, as it turns out, the activity of clarifying the parser’s choice of something does not happen at all when the action being processed applies to something else than one thing.

In

consult book about foo
(the book stand about)
You discover nothing of interest in the huge encyclopedia.

the message “(the book stand about)” can’t be intercepted by a rule for clarifying the parser’s choice of something.
Judging from the parser, this is very intentional; but I can’t see that it is mentioned in the documentation, so I suppose it belongs in the Inform bug tracker’s “errata list” for the documentation.