is there a way to disable "take all" for an NPC?

Authoring Inform 7
1

I have an NPC who can be ordered around. But because I have an unsuccessful attempt rule for them taking something, when the player tells them to “take all” in a room with lots of objects they aren’t allowed to take, it produces a huge, ugly list of all the objects, with a failure message for the action and a separate unsuccessful attempt message for each one. Having the NPC “take all” won’t ever be very useful for this NPC – is there a way I can refer to the action of “taking all” so I can use it in an instead rule? Or is there some other way to disable “take all” for an NPC?

1 Like
2

You can make a “rule for deciding whether all includes something”, and print a failure message there instead.

EDIT: Something like this.

Failure already shown is initially false.
Rule for deciding whether all includes something when the person asked is Alice:
    if failure already shown is false, say "Alice looks around in confusion. 'How do you expect me to do that?'";
    now failure already shown is true;
    it does not.
After reading a command: now failure already shown is false.

Or, now that I think of it, just use the “failure already shown” check in your Unsuccessful Attempt rules. That would be significantly simpler.

3

Failure already shown – that’s perfect. I was spending all kinds of time making my unsuccessful attempt messages not sound redundant when combined with my failure messages. Thanks!

EDIT: Oops, I misread this as “failure already shown” being some built-in thing I could use to not show duplicate failures of the same action. I understand it now. Thanks.