Irregular Verbs in Text Substitutions (6L38)

Authoring Inform 7
1

I’m attempting to update my Notepad extension to include variable story tense and viewpoint. It’s going pretty well, but the change log doesn’t suggest how to define an irregular verb. I can write…

To report is a verb. To protest is a verb.
…to produce “reported” or “protested” as needed. But one of my output sentences happens to use the verb “to leave” (past tense “left”). I don’t see any explanation in the change log of how to set that up. Suggestions would be welcome.

2

Same way you define new assertion verbs for relations:

To leave (he leaves, they leave, he left, it is leaving) is a verb.
3

Most of the irregular verbs (including “leave,” I bet) should work out of the box. If you need to hand-roll a conjugation, the old syntax still works (but if you scroll up, you’ll see that it’s important to get it right!) The one big exception I know of is that it conjugates “lie” as “to tell an untruth” (“lied”) rather than “to repose” (“lain”), and if you want to use them both there’s a problem–but otherwise you should be OK.

4

Cool – thanks. Now here’s a slightly different question on the same topic. When I choose third person singular as the story viewpoint, Inform defaults to “he” and “him.” For example:

Beethoven is a man in the Messy Front Parlor. "[Beethoven] [are] standing [there], scowling at [us]." The description is "His hair [haven't] been combed in days, and his waistcoat [regarding nothing][are] mis-buttoned." Beethoven has some text called the non-response. The non-response of Beethoven is "[Beethoven] [don't] seem to have heard [us]."

This produces the output:

Is there a way to change “him” to “her”, not with respect to Beethoven but with respect to the PC?

5

I believe that’s based on the gender of the object representing the player, which defaults to male. Saying explicitly that “yourself is female” (ungrammatical as that sounds) should override it.

6

And here’s yet another text substitution problem that I don’t understand. Here’s the code:

Carry out playing: say "[The actor] [try] a few tentative notes on [the noun], but it [regarding the Broadwood][are] in such poor condition that [the actor] [give] up almost before [the actor] [start]."
Here’s the result:

play piano

The 2nd and 3rd [the actor] are being translated into “himself.” How would I prevent this?

Edit: Fixed it. Substituted [we] the 2nd and 3rd times.

7

That works – thanks!

8

This is a weird quirk of the text substitution system. If the player is referenced through a variable (like “the actor”), and the substitution is in lower case (so probably not the subject of the sentence), and the player is the actor, it uses the reflexive form. This is somewhat non-intuitive but gives good results for more common cases like “[The actor] [look] at [the noun]” (which will give “The pianist looks at you”, “You look at the pianist”, “You look at yourself”).

9

…meaning that the solution in cases where “we” doesn’t work (for instance, if you were writing a report rule for any actor) would probably be to make a substitution for “the actor in nominative case,” which when the actor is the player produces “he/she/it/I/you/we/they” depending on the narrative viewpoint and gender of the player.