What’s the best way to make inform understand that these are two different things?
[code]clothes is a scenery in the closet. the description is “a number of suits that fill your closet. Since you’ve been in the secret service you’ve always warn the suits, and have grown to love them.”. understand “clothing”, “clothes”, and “suits” as clothes.
black suit and tie is a a thing in the closet. it is wearable. the description is “Your favorite black suit and tie.”. understand “suit”, “clothes”, “clothing”, and “suit and tie” as black suit and tie.
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One more thing
When you create a thing with a phrase such as
A thing called the black suit and tie is in the closet.
Inform automatically understands every word in the name of the thing (“black”, “suit”, “and”, and “tie”) as that thing.
So, it is quite unnecessary to include any of these words (or any combination of them, like “suit and tie”) in an understand statement.
All of this is true, also when you create things in this way:
A collection of clothes are scenery in the closet.
“Collection”, “of”, and “clothes” will in this case automatically be understood as the collection of clothes. There is no need of an explicit understand statement for them.
Likewise, it is in general unnecessary to put “the”, “a”, “an”, or “some” in understand statements
This works. An item with “and” in the name will usually cause problems; you can get around it with printed names and understands.
[code]The Walk-in Closet is a room. “Lots of clothes fill this space.”
clothes is a scenery in the closet. the description is “a number of suits that fill your closet. Since you’ve been in the secret service you’ve always worn the suits, and have grown to love them.”. understand “clothing” and “suits” as clothes.
favorite black suit is a a thing in the closet. the printed name is “your favorite suit and tie”. it is wearable. the description is “It’s your favorite black suit and tie.”. understand “tie”, “clothes”, “clothing”, and “suit and tie” as black suit.[/code]
The other issue here is that you tell Inform to understand “clothing” as the black suit and tie, but you also tell it to understand “clothing” as the clothes scenery object. (And similarly, you have it understand “clothes” as both the black suit and the clothes scenery). It compiles, but it may not behave quite in the way you expect during play. For example, X CLOTHES will examine the suit and tie without a disambiguation prompt, probably because the parser will assume that takeable things are more likely to be what the player wants to interact with than scenery.
Decide what you want “clothes” to refer to, and have it understand it only as that one thing. Don’t force the player to have to rely on the disambiguator more than necessary.