Looking at yourself

[vyznev]

@dootdoot

So, I have [the thing] and [the mirror] so that (I thought) they could be disambiguated later in the rule. If I have two nouns in the action like this, how do I refer to one vs the other in the conditions and carry out later?

By using “the second noun”. (Note: There is no “third noun”. In general, Inform doesn’t support actions with more than two nouns, although in some cases it’s possible to sort of kluge it.)

BTW, if you don’t like “the noun” and “the second noun” (which I agree often sound silly), it’s possible to define aliases for them (warning: untested code; I don’t have Inform installed on the computer I’m currently at):

Reflection-examining it in is an action applying to one visible thing and one visible thing. 
Understand "reflect [the thing] in [the mirror]" as reflection-examining it in.
Before reflection-examining something (called the image) in something (called the reflector):
	if the reflector is hand-held and the reflector is not held:
		instead say "You'll need to pick [the reflector] up to get a good angle."

Note the funny syntax “reflection-examining it in”, which is needed to tell Inform how to parse the rule later: the first noun replaces the “it”, while the second noun goes after the name of the action. See the bottom of Chapter 12.7. “New actions”, Chapter 16.2. “New commands for old grammar” and Chapter 16.22. “Review of Chapter 16: Understanding” for more details.

@dootdoot

However, I want to reduce frustration for the player as well. In some cases, I can see how other text displayed to the player might make it seem like the singular is something that can be entered as part of a command. In that case, I would want the player to be able to enter “Look at so-and-so’s eye” and get the result from “Look at so-and-so’s eyes”. Unfortunately, just adding “Understand “eye” as eyes” does not accomplish this. What am I missing?

That’s odd – it should work. You’ll probably want to add some refinements, such as telling Inform that eyes are (usually) “plural-named”, so that Inform will use plural verbs when referring to them, but other than that, it should be OK. In fact, that’s how I did it in the example code I posted upthread, and it worked for me.

There is, however, the issue pointed out by matt w, that having the word “eye” in the name of the Eye Patch Man is a bad idea, since that means that each of his body parts also gets the word “eye” in its name. A quick and dirty work-around, which I already suggested earlier, would be to rename him “Eye-Patch Man” with a hyphen, and just add some understanding rules to let the player refer to him with or without the hyphen. (The word “man” is not so problematic, because it’s the last part of his name, and so will only appear as “man’s” in the generated names of the body parts. And yeah, I wish Inform provided more control on how components of assemblies are named.)