Location printed before banner when starting in a vehicle?

Authoring Inform 7
1

So, I’m trying to have the player start the game inside a vehicle. Here are the relevant bits of the code I’m currently using:

[code]Include Rideable Vehicles by Graham Nelson.

7-11 Parking Lot is a room.

In 7-11 Parking Lot is a rideable vehicle called Your dad’s car.

Kelly is a person. “Kelly is sitting here next to you, her tail tucked around her paws.”. Understand “girlfriend/your girlfriend/cat” as Kelly.

The description of Kelly is “Your girlfriend, and also a cat. The cat part is new.[paragraph break]She’s one of those weird multicolored tabbies. Torbies, you think they’re called? Like tortoiseshell tabbies. Part of her is light orange with dark orange stripes and part is brown with black stripes, and she has this long tail that’s a little bit crooked.”.

When play begins:
say “Okay, okay, Elena, calm down, stop freaking out, [italic type]you do not need to freak out[roman type]. Breathe in, breathe out. It’s gonna be okay. You got this.[paragraph break]No, actually, that’s a lie. You don’t got this. You are not even remotely in the neighborhood of having got this. You are not sure whether you will ever in your brief mortal lifespan approach having got this. Because, see, here’s the thing: [italic type]your girlfriend has just turned into a cat.[roman type][paragraph break]This is not a euphemism or some hip new slang or anything like that. She is a real, actual, honest-to-God feline, whiskers, four paws, tail, and everything. And she is sitting there on the passenger seat of your dad’s car (which your dad kind of doesn’t know that you borrowed, but that’s the least of your worries right now), her tail neatly tucked around her paws and her huge greeny-gold eyes (they were brown before) looking at you reproachfully, as if this is somehow your fault. Which it totally, totally isn’t. Right?”;
now the player is in your dad’s car;
now Kelly is in your dad’s car.[/code]

This produces the following:

I know it’s the “now the player is in your dad’s car” rule that’s causing the room description to print before the banner text, but I can’t figure out how to get the player to start the game in the car without that happening. It seems you can’t use “move the player to” for containers and can’t append “without printing the room description” to “now the player is” rules, so I’m really not sure how else to go about keeping the room description from firing that one time (without affecting it at any other point in the game). Suggestions?

2

You don’t actually want to use a rideable vehicle – those are vehicles you ride on top of. So just drop “rideable” from the line that creates Your dad’s car, and then you can say

Kelly is in Your dad's car. The player is in Your dad's car.

after you define Kelly and the car.

EDIT: Note that in your output it says “(on your dad’s car)”. I guess you can use “Now the X is in…” for supporters and it will just move the X onto the supporter, but if you try to make an initial declaration that the player is in a supporter it won’t compile, because that’s effectively declaring it as a container as well.

3

Also your Understand "girlfriend/your girlfriend/cat" as Kelly. line won’t work as you want: it allows the player to refer to the cat as only “girlfriend girlfriend”, “your girlfriend”, “girlfriend cat”, and “your cat” (plus “kelly”, thanks to the initial definition). Instead, you probably want something like Understand "your/my girlfriend/cat" and "girlfriend/cat" as Kelly.

To start with the player and Kelly already in the car, just add “The player is in the car. Kelly is in the car.” to Kelly’s definition paragraph.

4

Thanks guys! I am obviously not good at reading documentation carefully enough. :blush: