Mark Tilford's Simple Chat

Authoring Inform 7
1

It’s been a while since I’ve played around with Inform 7, on downloading the newest release I’ve been trying to sort through the parts that were broken by it; using Simple Chat doesn’t seem to work, thought Simple chat was compatible with newest version, but I get this error and can’t figure out how to fix it – any help much appreciated:

Problem. You wrote ‘Instead of talking to NPC when in the Bedroom’ , which seems to introduce a rule taking effect only ‘when in the Bedroom’. But this condition did not make sense, so I am unable to accept this rule.

See the manual: 7.12 > 7.12. In the presence of, and when

…Is there a simple way to check to make sure the both the player and NPC are in the same room before chatting? Before it worked fine as it was, but my old game doesn’t run in the newest version of Inform 7.

2

The phrasing “when in [room]” was removed in the newest version. Change it to “when the location is [room]”. But there will likely be larger problems to worry about once this one is fixed.

3

Thanks, I’m going through scene by scene and just porting my game in blocks into the new version of Inform 7 as I get time to get it up and running so I can continue. When you say there will be larger problems does anything come to mind that I should know in advance?

4

It depends how old your source is, and which other extensions it uses. Procedural rules and the “change [X] to [Y]” phrase may be problematic in your main source text.