Is there a built-in way to give different descriptions of things, say scenery, depending on whether that piece of scenery has already been examined? Something similar in concept to the [if the visited-count of the location is less than 3] I often use for rooms.
I can do it with a value, changing the value after examination of the scenery, and then “if” checking that value within the scenery’s description, but that seems a bit beefy for something I’d like to do fairly regularly.
There are a number of ways to do this, but I often find the easiest is:
The description is "[one of]This is a long, elaborate description the player only sees the first time[or]A terser one for subsequent tries[stopping]."
Stopping works through each of the options (separated by [or]) and then settles on the last-listed option, so you could add multiple steps too. And of course this works for anything – I find it really helpful!
Perfect! Exactly what I was looking for, thank you.
Randomized text descriptions are my jam. Check out 5:7 Text with random alternatives for a full list of possiblities.
fulyl concur and agree: this list is one of the major elements in my classifying I7 as the top-notch in adaptive prose handling in the excursus on current IF languages I posted some days ago.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
Bookmarking this posthaste!