Instead of asking Nurse about something when the topic understood matches the regular expression "\bdoctor": say "Whatever." doesn’t work if the player types Doctor or DOCTOR? Is there a way to make the input case insensitive?

I decided to start working on fixing a section of dialog gradually, by first changing the INSTEAD OFs to CARRY OUTs. Carry out asking the Waitress about something: say "[one of]'I simply don't know what you mean.'[or]'That seems irrelevant.'[cycling]" Carry out asking the Waitress about somet…

For now, I am going with the “topic understood in lower case” band-aid so I don’t break my game. If I can figure out how to “fix” my dialog without breaking it simultaneously, I’ll redo everything.

My recommendation would be to keep the Instead rules but to use Inform’s normal parser instead of regex matching, for what it’s worth.

[image] Cody Gaisser: When things said “instead of”, You’d get only the appropriate reply. The “There is no reply” comes from the “block asking rule”, which is a Report rule (“Report an actor asking something about”). One way to prevent that message from being printed (in those cases when pe…

[image] Cody Gaisser: I looked over the examples from the documentation that you linked. They’re still using “instead” rules. Is there another way to do it? In my ever-humble opinion, the doc examples overuse Instead rules. Daniel did a good job laying out the thinking behind it, but I’d subm…

That’s a little over my head but you’ve given me some key terms to look for. I am a pretty bad coder and have been cobbling games together the only way I know how, which involves a lot of uses of “instead.” From what you’re saying, I’m probably going about things the wrong way. I’ll see if I can fi…

If you’re working toward the ECTOCOMP deadline, I definitely don’t think switching to check/carry out rules is worth it. I do think switching to use Inform’s parsing facilities instead of regexes will save you a lot of time in testing and debugging, though.

Thanks, I will try to figure that out.

Instead of asking Waitress about something: say "[one of]'That's simply not important now.'[or]'That seems irrelevant.'[cycling]". Instead of asking Waitress about "diner/work/job": say "I had to work to get this place. I don't know why or how." ASK WAITRESS ABOUT DINER yields "That's…

Wild stab in the dark here: try putting the irrelevant rule at the end of the instead rule book? (Or just declare it last?)

How to make conversation not case sensitive?

Authoring Inform 7

Zed (Zed Lopez) October 13, 2022, 7:40pm 30

Here’s another good description, by @HanonO :

And another useful thread on the subject…