Need help with a conditional snippet I can NOT make work

Authoring Inform 7
1

Hi:

New to the Inform 7 community and building a game. I am trying something simple and not doing very well.

Very simply, I have two rooms of interest, the Post Office and the Town Hall, both defined. At the beginning, going down from the Post Office is set to nowhere. That works. However, in another part of the game I have a note. After the note has been read, or looked at, I want to change things so that going down from the Post Office goes to the Town Hall. I have tried an abundance of things and nothing works:

After examining the note:
Now the Town Hall is down from the Post Office;
Continue the action.

(The indents are there in the original but cannot reproduce them with the bolding)

This version gives me this error:

```
Problem. In the sentence ‘Now the Town Hall is down from the Post Office’ … I was expecting to read a condition, but instead found some text that I couldn’t understand - ‘the Town Hall is down from the Post Office’.

Because of this problem, the source could not be translated into a working game. (Correct the source text to remove the difficulty and click on Go once again.)

I tried this with various versions, with or without the NOW, using Instead instead of AFTER, and no luck. Is there an obvious answer?

Many thanks

Anthony

2

Does this work?

After examining the note:
    Change the down exit of Town Hall to Post Office;
    Change the up exit from Post Office to Town Hall;
    Continue the action.

The change the ... exit ... of ... to ... syntax is described briefly in Recipe Book #40, “Prisoner’s Dilemma”. Note that you have to explicitly make the reciprocal map connection, if that’s what you want; Inform doesn’t infer it for you in this case.

1 Like
3

Also note that the more ‘modern’ syntax of ‘Now the down exit of the Town Hall is…’ doesn’t work.

4

Just for the sake of alternatives: it’s also possible to define this exit as a secret door, such that it’s treated as not available until revealed by some action.

Include Secret Doors by Gavin Lambert.

A trapdoor is a secret door.
It is down from Town Hall and up from Post Office.

Carry out examining the note: now the trapdoor is revealed.

(Once revealed, it acts like any other door and you can examine it and open/close it etc. Or you can set it so that it automatically opens and can’t be closed again, if you prefer.)

2 Likes
5

This worked perfectly! (After I changed the “from” in the second line to “of” to match the first line). MANY thanks!! I will study the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

1 Like
6

Yes, I’m still learning the syntax!

7

Thanks Gavin. I will save this for later.