Hi,
I’m writing a piece of IF (in Inform7) that takes place on a ship. So, of course, I want to use shipboard directions, and I don’t really need any other directions.
Just to remind ourselves, shipboard directions are fore, aft, starboard, and port.
For the convenience of the player, I want to use the respective abbreviations f, a, s, and p.
In particular, I want to write
Understand “s” as starboard.
Of course, my abbreviation s for starboard collides with the predefined abbreviation s for south from the standard rules:
Understand “s” as south.
I found the following two implementations of shipboard directions.
First, the extension Shipboard Directions by Mikael Segercrantz (http://inform7.com/extensions/Mikael%20Segercrantz/Shipboard%20Directions/index.html ).
This extension uses the abbreviation sb for starboard, so there’s no collision with the abbreviation s for south.
That is certainly a viable option, but as I said above, I don’t want to do this.
Second, example #42 from “Writing with Inform”.
This example uses the abbreviation s for starboard and thus has a collision with the abbreviation s for south.
To get around this problem, the extension uses the following phrase.
Does the player mean going a nautical direction when the location is nautical: it is very likely.
Without this phrase, the response to the player’s input s is:
Which do you mean, the south or the starboard?
Since I have only nautical locations and no non-nautical locations, I can remove the when-condition from the above phrase and simplify it to
Does the player mean going a nautical direction: it is very likely.
With this, I get rid of Inform’s response-question
Which do you mean, the south or the starboard?
However, I wonder if there is another way of undoing the definition
Understand “s” as south.
from the standard rules (other than altering the standard rules file, of course).
More generally, if there is a definition
Understand “x” as y.
that may come from my own code, or from an extension, or from the standard rules,
is there an easy way to make Inform completely forget that definition at some point in the game?
Thanks for your help.
John