Handling automatic selection of goodies in inform7

Authoring Inform 7
1

Building up my game using a ‘test room’ approach to test out game mechanics and the like (much faster than running through the game to get to the interesting bits). Consider the following scenario:

Test Room
There is a white guinea pig here, looking slightly distressed.
 
Alice > i
You are carrying:
  a utility belt (being worn)
    a white cartridge
    a yellow cartridge
    a red cartridge
  a spray gun (being worn)
 
Alice > put white in gun
(the distressed white guinea pig in the spray gun)
(first taking the distressed white guinea pig)
I don't suppose the distressed white guinea pig would care for that.
 
Alice > put yellow in gun
(first taking the yellow cartridge)
You put the yellow cartridge into the spray gun.
 
Alice > drop red
You haven't got that.
 
Alice > drop cartridge
Which do you mean, the white cartridge, the red cartridge or the yellow cartridge?

First, using ‘white’ apparently does not raise the disambiguation question. I would want it to refer to the white cartridge since it makes sense to try to put that into the gun instead of the pig.

Putting something in a container seems to have no problem to automatically get that something from another container worn by the player, but dropping something is unable to find it if there is a single match, but does raise the disambiguation question when it is ambiguous? What am I missing here?

I also tried to use “Implicit Actions” by Eric Eve but that did not seem to help here.

Suggestions are welcome!

2

What triggers disambiguation and how Inform rates the various choices is a deep topic - there was a recent thread on it that I’m not immediately finding - but happily, all you need here is a Does The Player Mean rule. Something like this should work:

Does the player mean inserting a cartridge into the spray gun: it is very likely.

(Assuming you’ve defined cartridges as a kind of thing).

EDIT: found the thread!

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