Listing the contents of a room

Authoring Inform 7
1

Hello,

I am trying to emulate the default “looking” behavior. For a series of rooms, I want to be able to source the room description from a table because the table entry will be reused elsewhere.

I have things pretty much figured out, except for the “list of” that will produce the list of things in the room (absent scenery, yourself, backgrounds, etc.) I cannot figure out the magic.

I have 2 rooms, and 4 things: a door, some scenery, and 2 takeable items.

The list i am looking for is {door, wooden stocks, foo}. what i get is {door, yourself, grease jars, foo, wooden stocks" using the “list of visible things in the location”.

What should I be using instead? Thanks in advance.

The Stocks Room is a room. "The original, unused description of the Stocks Room. Standard I7 behavior."

after going when the location is the stocks room:
	try looking;

instead of looking when the location is the Stocks Room:
	choose a row with a locale of Stocks Room in the table of Hell Ride Events;
	say "[bold type][locale text entry][roman type][line break][description entry][paragraph break]";
	say "You can see [the list of visible things in the location] here.[paragraph break]";
	continue the action;

Table of Hell Ride Events
locale	locale text	description
Stocks Room	"Stocks Room"	"This is the new, replacement description of the Stocks Room."

An aqua door is an door. The description of the aqua door is "It[']s an aqua door." 
The aqua door is west of the Maintenance Office and east of the Stocks Room. 

The wooden stocks are a supporter in the Stocks Room. The description is "These are the wooden stocks." 

The foo is in the stocks room. the description is "This is a foo."

The grease jars are in the Stocks Room. They are scenery.
2

I think you can more or less get what you want with “the list of described things that are not scenery in the location”.

However, messing with the functionality of looking is potentially dangerous – there’s a lot of complexity and weird edge cases to run afoul of. If all you want is to make it easy to reuse room descriptions, you can just use a to-say rule, or just make each room’s description explicitly reference the relevant table entry. Those approaches will be way simpler and less likely to lead to headaches later!

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3

Carry out looking is broken up into helpful steps in the standard rules. It should be not too hard to modify the part you need to (room description body heading and/or body text).

4

Thank you.

I didn’t realize i could reference “[description corresponding to the locale of Stocks Room in the Table of Hell Ride Events” in a room description!

You’re right! Much simpler!

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