Naming doors

Authoring Inform 7
1

I created a door and named it with the following:

There is a closed openable door between Attic and Hallway. It is called the hatch.

But I got the message:

Problem. The sentence ‘It is called the hatch’ appears to say two things are the same - I am reading ‘It’ and ‘called the hatch’ as two different things, and therefore it makes no sense to say that one is the other: it would be like saying that ‘Tom is Jerry’. It would be all right if the second thing were the name of a kind, perhaps with properties: for instance ‘Mouse-Hole is a lighted room’ says that something called Mouse-Hole exists and that it is a ‘room’, which is a kind I know about, combined with a property called ‘lighted’ which I also know about.

I thought this would be relatively simple.

2

“The hatch is a closed openable door. It is down from the Attic and up from the Hallway.”

Remember “between” doesn’t work–it doesn’t tell Inform which direction it’s in, for one thing.

3

I tried matt w’s solution, and got this:

Problem. The sentence ‘The hatch is a closed openable door’ appears to say two things are the same - I am reading ‘hatch’ and ‘closed openable door’ as two different things, and therefore it makes no sense to say that one is the other: it would be like saying that ‘the hawk is the handsaw’. It would be all right if the second thing were the name of a kind, perhaps with properties: for instance ‘Elsinore is a lighted room’ says that something called Elsinore exists and that it is a ‘room’, which is a kind I know about, combined with a property called ‘lighted’ which I also know about.

4

Doors are closed and openable by default. Try just “the hatch is a door. It is up from…”

Also make sure you have not already connected the two rooms on either side.

5

I did that, and I keep getting problem messages.
Here is the code:

Attic is a room. It is above Hallway.

The hatch is a door. The hatch is down from the Attic and up from the Hallway.

And here is the message:

Problem. You wrote ‘The hatch is down from the Attic and up from the Hallway’ , but in another sentence ‘It is above Hallway’ : but this looks like a contradiction, which might be because I have misunderstood what was meant to be the subject of one or both of those sentences.

It seems like there ought to be a simple solution, but it eludes me.

6

When you place a room explicitly, as in “It is above Hallway.”, that tells Inform to create a direct connection. Then you try to create an indirect connection (via the door) in the next line. That would make two separate “up” exits from the Hallway, which Inform doesn’t like.

7

Got it. I deleted the line “It is above Hallway” and it compiled. Thanks once again, Draconis.