I’m a little confused here, once more, as I’m attempting to make synonyms work (e.g., make a character referrable to by their first or last name as well as their full name, or make something with a long name able to be referred to by a shorter description).
Here’s an example of what I have that doesn’t work:
Understand “photo” as “[photo of the crime scene]”.
However, when I ask a character about “photo”, unlike when I ask them about “photo of the crime scene”, I get the ‘There is no reply’ response.
This works automatically with objects, but with topics (which are just chunks of text) you need to set it up like your doing.
That should work, but without seeing your whole code, I’m not sure where you went wrong. This works:[code]Lab is a room. Sam Spade is a man in the lab.
The photo of the crime scene is in the lab.
Understand “a/the photo/photograph of a/the crime scene” or “photo/photograph of a/the crime scene” or “a/the photo/photograph of crime scene” or “photo/photograph of crime scene” or “a/the photo/photograph” or “photo/photograph” as “[photo of the crime scene]”.
Instead of asking sam spade about “[photo of the crime scene]”, say “This is the response I’m looking for.”
test me with “ask sam about photo / ask spade about the photo / ask sam about photograph / ask sam spade about the photo of the crime scene / ask sam about photo of crime scene / ask sam spade about the photo of crime scene / ask sam about photo of the crime scene / ask sam about photo of a crime scene / ask spade about the photograph”.
[/code]Three things to note about the above:1) You don’t need to set up synonyms for asking Sam Spade – “Sam,” “Sam Spade” and just “Spade” all work, since the someone part of the action deals with objects (people);2) however, if you later want to ask someone else about Sam, you’ll need to go through the synonym adding process for him as a topic;3) you need to type a bunch of stuff to cover every possibility.
IMO, if you have a game where people are going to be asking about a lot of things – like a mystery, for example – you should create a new action for that. See example 282 “Nameless” for a way to do that.