Sorry about the spam, I swear everything I’ve turned up in the docs and the forum has been for adjacent-but-different problems/questions (example).
I’m trying to figure out if it’s possible to modify the wording of the non-player-supplied portions of the default “What do you want to [verb]?” disambiguation prompt. The context is that for at least one verb, it makes more sense to ask “Where do you want to [verb]?”, even though we are still speaking of things and not rooms.
Problem: as far as I can tell, custom “supplying a missing noun/second noun” rules require you to override the default disambiguation prompt entirely? And perhaps because it’s not an error per se, I don’t see a named parser-error-type listed in the documentation.
Is there some way to customize this? Pseudocode to convey my intention:
Rule for printing a missing noun prompt when the player's command includes "pose":
say "Where do you want to pose?".
edit to clarify because rereading this made me realize how bizarrely pointless it sounds – it’s moderately important to me that the player should be able to provide severely underspecified commands in this game, because it’s a very nonsensical game with an already too-high level of verbguessery, heh.
I think what you need to do is change the parser clarification internal rule response (D) when the player’s command includes “pose” – you probably want to change it back afterwards (you might be able to just build the conditional into the response text with an assertion rather than a rule, it now occurs to me? But this has worked for me in the past):
After reading a command when the player's command includes "pose":
Now the parser clarification internal rule response (D) is "Where do you want to pose?[no line break]"
EDIT: as usual, Phil’s reply is better – of course you need to figure out exactly which of the responses is being issued in your case.
Are you looking for this part of the standard rules?
The parser clarification internal rule translates into I6 as
"PARSER_CLARIF_INTERNAL_R" with
"Who do you mean, " (A),
"Which do you mean, " (B),
"Sorry, you can only have one item here. Which exactly?" (C),
"Whom do you want [if the noun is not the player][the noun] [end if]to
[parser command so far]?" (D),
"What do you want [if the noun is not the player][the noun] [end if]to
[parser command so far]?" (E),
"those things" (F),
"that" (G),
" or " (H).
You can set parser clarification internal rule response (E), and possibly get what you want.
Thank you both! For future reference, where should I look to find such rules? In addition to the documentation, I don’t seem to see it in the Index, either.
Rather than checking if the player’s command includes a particular word, I would look at what action the parser is actually working with.
To decide what action name is the action-to-be: (- action_to_be -).
[if the action-to-be is posing:]
This is a little I6 inclusion that’s useful enough I can’t understand why it’s not in the standard rules. It lets you see what action the parser is working on when an error happens, before the “current action” has been set.
