Help! Doors are in my way!

Authoring
1

I have a collection of adjacent rooms and did not put in explicit doors but I mention doors in the room description. That triggers people to do things like “examine door” or “open door”, which gets the response “I see no such thing”. How can I describe these doors so that they are scenery. They are not necessary since a player can move from one room to another without opening any of the (implicit) doors. The compiler sees ‘door’ as a special kind and I would like to treat it as scenery.

Of course, I can add explicit doors to every room, but I think that’s overkill.
-Falsoon

2

I think something like this will work.

doordesc is a backdrop. It is everywhere.

Understand "door/doorway/knob/doorknob/key/lock/keyhole" and "key hole" and "door knob" and "door way" as doordesc.

The description of doordesc is "(The doors are really cool, but you don't need to refer to the doors; they'll open and close for you automatically! Just go in a direction specified and don't worry about the doors!)"

Instead of doing anything except examining to a doordesc: try examining the noun.

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3

Hanon-
Thanks for this. I don’t want doors to be everywhere (I do have other explicit doors and areas where these implicit doors are not) but this is a good tip. I can try a variation of it.

4

I’m pretty sure you can specify where your backdrops are explicitly. A backdrop is essentially scenery that can exist in multiple locations. (Like “the sky” or “a riverbank”, but it has uses like this!)

doordesc is a backdrop. It is in Foyer, Front Hall, Vestibule, and Corridor of Doors.

5

Hanon,
Got it working. I made the doordesc a backdrop in each of the TeleportRooms, viz.

Each TeleportRoom contains a doordesc.

I could have made TeleportRooms a region, but “each” worked as well.
Thanks.

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6

Ah, that’s creating a separate doordesc object in each TeleportRoom. It works fine that way, but you might as well not make them backdrops.

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7

Andrew,
I was wondering about that. I guess I could make the TeleportRoom a region, and make doordesc a backdrop for the region, yes?

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8

Yes. There’s also a trick for getting a backdrop into any describable set of rooms (see chapter 8.8):

The doordesc is a backdrop. 
A room can be doorful.

When play begins:
	move doordesc backdrop to all doorful rooms.

For annoying reasons, the “move X backdrop to all Y rooms” line has to be done inside a rule. You can’t declare it as a top-level declaration. But doing it once at “play begins” time is sufficient.

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9

Andrew–
Thank you for the tip, especially about the “inside a rule” part, although that seems less straightforward (a workaround) than merely putting a doordesc in each room (or region);
as in
Each TeleportRoom has a doordesc.

btw, how does one put Courier font (to represent code) inside a reply?

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10

When composing a message, highlight your code and hit the button that shows </>
or manually surround your code in back-ticks singly ` per line or three on a single line ``` before and after for multiple paragraphs.

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11 
When messaging begins:
     thank each contributor

Thanks!

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