I’m trying to make actions that apply to things that may or may not be present. For example, “remember x” along the lines of The Aisle, where the game says something about a thing that might not be nearby. Since the default setting is to apply new actions only to nearby objects, and “applying to a non-visible object” doesn’t seem to work, I can’t think of any way to do this. Is it even possible to have actions apply to objects not in the same room? Thanks for your help.
This topic is covered in the Recipe Book under the category ``commands;’’ see RB 6.2. It will also point you to Writing with Inform; see WI 16.7.
You do this by 1) declaring your action as acting on a visible object and 2) declaring your grammar using “any” tokens:
Thinking about is an action applying to one visible thing. Understand "think about [any thing]" as thinking about.Why does Inform call this a “visible” thing when it really means that the thing can be either visible or not visible? It’s a strange terminological choice that will hopefully be changed at some point–you’re definitely not the first to have been confused about it–but if you think of visible in this case as simply the more expansive selector when opposed to “touchable,” that might help it make more sense.
–Erik
Got it, thanks!