That must be what I’m thinking of. The documentation seems to tilt in favor of locale paragraphs and object priorities, though I lack the expertise to evaluate that position.
Thanks for all your suggestions and solutions. I will most definitely have a look and try them out.
I did try the scenery option but then I cannot interact with object/person.
That is why I stick do the undescribed option for now.
Here’s a simple example. Hope it helps.
"the planner" by "Blank"
The passageway is a room. "A plain, institutional corridor giving access to the Planning Center to the north."
[the passageway is just somewhere to start so you can walk in and out of the planning center and force a "Look" while the game is still running.]
[Not wanting things to show up in the "you can also see" paragraph is common enough that Inform provides a shortcut. Simply put the name of the thing in square brackets within the room description and it tells Inform that the item has already been mentioned.]
The planning center is north of the passageway. "Bleak fluorescent ceiling lights cast a flat glow over this space, which is dominated by the gray bulk of the master desk in the center of the room. The staff sit at their stations around the periphery: reading clockwise around the room, these are the [security chief], the heads of sectors A and G, [the translator] and the [protocol chief]."
Security chief is a man in the planning center.
Protocol chief is a woman in the planning center.
Sector A chief is a man in the planning center.
Sector G chief is a woman in the planning center.
The translator is a man in the planning center.
[The weakness with the square bracket technique is that you have to use the exact name of the thing in the description. That would be okay if we'd written one object to be both sector heads, but we didn't. So we have to deal with the situation by hand.]
Rule for writing a paragraph about sector G chief:
say "Sector G chief [one of]sighs[or]mutters[or]scratches her head[at random] and makes an annotation on her report sheet.";
[This is an easy way to write "fidgets" for characters so they can randomly do things each turn, or once every several turns. If she can move around, then you'd have to check the location and change the messages to something appropriate.]
Rule for writing a paragraph about sector A chief:
now sector A chief is mentioned;
[This simply "switches off" the mention of sector A chief in the room. I wrote it very simply -- but in a real game this would likely be a bug, because it switches off mention of the chief everywhere. If the chief moved from room to room, he'd be invisible to the player!]
If you copy and paste this into a quick test game you can experiment with the code and see how it works.
Thanks, appreciate it
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