I was recently playing around with Inform 7 and wanted to try removing the option to use “all” on all verbs. But it turned out to be much more difficult than I thought.
Now, I was really surprised with this because in ZIL it requires just removing or adding the word MANY in the syntax definitions. So it seemed strange, considering they began from the same language - the z-machine.
Are there any like this in different languages that are like, very complicated in one language and really easy in another, or just different?
None in the end (I gave up on Inform) but looking it up I remember a lot of Inform 6 code and a lot of complicated stuff. I also checked for adding all to a verb, and it was still quite complicated.
Ah, yeah. At first I thought I could do something trashy like this
rule for deciding whether all includes something: it does not.
The parser nothing error internal rule response (B) is "Please designate a specific noun.".
It worked more than I expected, but less than enough. oh, well
This is cool! But really, from a player’s point of view, please authors don’t disallow DROP ALL and TAKE ALL, they’re handier than you’d imagine. So that means the only standard verb one needs to mess with is inserting it into, I believe.
Yes. unless you’re Eat Me where you don’t need to take, or To Sea In A Sieve where it’s the whole game. But I definitely agree, otherwise, it’s so annoying not to be able to.
Meadow
The sun is shining brightly in the sky.
You can see a sausage here.
>i
You are carrying:
Not a sausage.
>get all
meadow: Taken.
sun: Taken.
sky: Taken.
sausage: The sausage and not a sausage annihilate each other.
>i
You are carrying:
a meadow.
a sun.
a sky.
>look
>
Meadow
The sun is shining brightly in the sky.
You can see a sausage and a lantern here.
>i
You are carrying:
Not a sausage.
>get all
meadow: Taken.
sun: Taken.
sky: Taken.
sausage: The sausage and not a sausage annihilate each other.
lantern: That's hardly portable.
>i
You are carrying:
a meadow.
a sun.
a sky.
>look
You can see a lantern here.
>
one thing I noticed in tads3 is it’s very easy to modify the player character entity from the get-go. rename them, reference them with their name and/or pronouns, change the game pov to 1st, 2nd, or 3rd when referring to them in a consistent way using 1-3 lines of code at minimum
adv3
me: Actor 'martha/woman*women' 'Martha'
isProperName = true
isHer = true
# below line is not necessary for the above to work
pcReferralPerson = ThirdPerson
adv3lite
me: Actor 'Martha;; woman; her'
# below line is not necessary for the above to work
person = 3
;
I don’t know how easily inform does this but considering the bugs I’ve seen in inform games where I can x me but x martha or x her will get a default error message (assuming the player character is established to be named Martha with she/her pronouns), as if that is something that needs to be separately considered seems to indicate this is less simple.
oh, well
