Incinerator

Authoring Inform 7
1

I am calling upon your help again!

I want to be able insert objects into a trashcan and use a lit match to remove them from play, leaving behind charred remains.

This is what I have so far;

After inserting something into the trashcan when the lit match is inside the trashcan: now the noun is nowhere; now the charred remains are inside the trashcan.

This isn’t showing any errors, but is not working either. The charred remains appear in the trashcan but the objects are not removed from play. Can anyone advise?

Thanks in advance.

2

Or possibly this:

[code]Some charred ashes are a thing.
A thing can be burnable.
A lit match is burnable.
The priceless manuscript is burnable.
The ancient dagger is a thing.

Every turn when the trashcan contains a lit match and the number of burnable things in trashcan is greater than 1:
say “Foomph! [The list of burnable things in trashcan] [are] incinerated in an instant!”;
if charred ashes is off-stage:
now charred ashes is in trashcan.[/code]

This lets you mark things you want destroyable by this process.
(I think “nowhere” used to work, but was deprecated in favor of “off-stage”.

3

Hi Hanon,

Thanks for your suggestion. I gave it a go, but it’s throwing up this error message:

The phrase or rule definition ‘Every turn when the trashcan contains a lit match and the number of burnable things in trashcan is greater than 1’ is written using the ‘colon and indentation’ syntax for its 'if’s, 'repeat’s and 'while’s, where blocks of phrases grouped together are indented one tab step inward from the ‘if …:’ or similar phrase to which they belong. But the tabs here seem to be misaligned, and I can’t determine the structure. The first phrase going awry in the definition seems to be ‘say “Foomph! [The list of burnable thi […] ] [are] incinerated in an instant!”’ , in case that helps.

I tried playing around with the syntax a little bit but I can’t seem to get it to work.

4

It’s complaining about the spacing of the lines. Make sure it looks exactly as above in your source text (you haven’t accidentally clipped out some of the spacing, or added spacing to the first line).

Alternatively, try replacing all of the leading spaces with tabs – one tab for the lines that are one step indented and two tabs for the line that’s two steps indented.

5

Sorry, I spaced that out manually instead of hitting the tab key. If you paste it in, delete the empty space and insert tabs appropriately.

6

Tip: if you use four spaces per tab when typing on the forum, Inform will correct it automatically when you copy/paste it in.

7

WHAT?

I mean, what? Inform automatically converts four spaces to a tab?

…then why did I spend so much time looking for an iPod editor that included the elusive tab key for the sole purpose of working on an WIP whenever I wasn’t home?