I have a situation where I need to call a certain bit of code after each time the player presses return on the input line. I have been using the “after reading a command” rules to do this, but I’m finding that Inform is inconsistent about it when it invokes those rules.
They are always invoked after a simple command, of course. But beyond that point, Inform seems to take a hacky and inconsistent approach to calling them. After disambiguating between two objects (“Which key do you mean, the red or the blue?”), the after reading a command rules are called from the NounDomain routine. The same routine also handles cases like this:
However, NounDomain does NOT call the after reading a command rules for this type of two-part input. I can hack it into NounDomain at the end of that routine on the same model used for the multiple-disambiguation does (placing it after the second input has been combined with the first to produce a full command, just before the RETURN RE_PARSE), and things seem to work fine. But is it really necessary that I hack the template layer, or is there somewhere else I could insert the instruction? There are other situations, such as after Yes/No questions, where Inform also does not call the “after reading a command” rules–do I just have to hack into the template layer to get at those too?
Are there other potential situations that I’m missing? Why does Inform not handle this consistently?
Thanks,
Erik