I have a table for asking an npc about various things. It all works fine except for some topics. Any of them that have multiple entries for their topic work except if one of those entries has a space in it.
Currently a lot my table looks like this:
Table of Artimus Conversation
topic reply summary
"Artimus/himself" "'That's my name. I've been here a long time.'" "Some things about Artimus."
"the tents" "None of the tents are mine, I'd stay out of them." "About the tents"
"tent/tents" "None of the tents are mine, I'd stay out of them." "About the tents"
But there has to be some way to combine the “the tents” and “tent/tents” into “the tents/tent/tents” right? Am I missing something simple that can represent a space to put between the and tents?
I’m new to both Inform 7 and the IF forum. Thank you for your help and your patience.
What you need is to make the “the” optional, so one entry corresponds to every possible iteration of the tent, tent, the tents, tents, etc. The way to do this in Inform is with a double dash, which indicates that a blank will satisfy the syntax in addition to the specific named words. So “the/— tent/tents” should get you where you’re going!
I’m not the originator of the post, but I rolled my own, in what looks like a similar table of X conversation way… Always looking for ideas to up my NPC’s conversations without implementing a major extension… (although maybe I’ll break down and use one of the extensions next time) Any thoughts/questions about rolling your own?
The only thing I was thinking was that I typically make the left-hand column things and/or subjects (as defined in Eric Eve’s Epistemology) to avoid any fiddliness with text strings. Using things and subjects also allows disambiguation, and lets you use nearby things easily as topics of conversation.
Yes, and now I’m editing my tables such that the left hand column is: “the/-- thing/things”… The other thing I do is I have one table for each NPC’s ask about table, and a separate generic table of things. If the item isn’t in their specific table, it checks the catch-all table for things all NPC’s can be asked about.
