Okay, here’s something that feels like it should be pretty remedial, but it’s stumping me tonight. I feel like I’m stumbling past something obvious
What’s the syntax for referring to everything in a specific container (in order to move everything in one box magically to a different box, for example, or to apply a “damp” property to everything in a bag that gets dropped in water, etc)?
I’ve tried dozens of variations on “every object in” or “everything contained by” “everything in” or “every thing enclosed by” or “the contents of the” or “JUST ALL THE SHT IN THE BAG GDD*MMIT” and some of the failures to compile have been more surprising than others, but they’ve all failed to compile
Most of those will work. What did you try exactly?
All of the following work:
now the player carries everything in the box.
now the player carries every thing in the box.
now the player carries everything contained in the box.
now the player carries everything enclosed by the box. [not quite the same in its handling of nested containers]
I was specifically trying to “move” them (move everything in the satchel to the Chamber of Doom). When I shifted to “now” (now everything in the satchel is in the Chamber of Doom) everything worked just fine
So I gather that my problem wasn’t really my grasp of the container-contents syntax, but rather my grasp of what “move” is capable of (re multiple objects)?
I think there may be two things that make “move” specifically useful. One is the “without printing a room description” option, the other is that it automatically handles moving things to rooms/supporters/containers/people properly – if you just tried to replace every “move X to Y” with “now X is in Y” I think it might have trouble with things like “move the noun to the holder of the second noun.” Maybe it would be doable to let “move X to Y” work with X as a description of multiple objects, though I’m not sure.
I was thinking that perhaps “without printing a room description” could be saved by deprecating it except when it’s the player being moved, but even aside from the other issue I mentioned, you might sometimes want to use “without printing a room description” when X might be the player but isn’t guaranteed to be, as in this silly example.
What really stumped me for the long-haul was the error messages when attempting to compile … they consistently targeted my syntax for referring to multiple objects (claiming they didn’t know what any of that could possibly be referring to), hence the OP.
