in an attempt to earn my tips i’ll jump back in with unasked for fukui-san commentary.
speaking of “not mentioning things”, dialog is very deliberate about not mentioning things (now THAT’s a segue).
dialog leaves it entirely up to the programmer what’s described and what isn’t. unlike ZIL and inform6 (i’m not sure about inform7 and i don’t remember what TADS does) everything is initially ‘scenery’ by default. the programmer takes responsibility for describing everything in the room either in the room description itself or with an (appearance) predicate.
if a takeable object needs to be described:
(appearance #tvRemote)
(* is pristine)
The TV remote, dappled with congealed nacho cheese, pokes out from under the futon.
this will stay in effect until the remote is handled by the player (no longer ‘pristine’) and from then on the game automatically takes over and describes it generically (“you see a tv remote here”). or if you wish to continue to customize the description you can supply an (appearance *) predicate without the pristine qualifier.
this might sound like a pain but it actually allows fine granular control over exactly what gets described, how it’s described, and when it’s described.