I’m new to interactive fiction – I apologize for my lack of correct terminology.
I cannot for the life of me find a way to override the default description of things. For rooms that one cannot enter, the description is ‘You cannot go there’. I’ve been adding ‘Instead of going south, say “such and such”.’ No matter what I do, the tagline ‘You cannot go there’ appears after my substitution.
Is this something that can be easily fixed?
For movement, have a look at the ‘Easiest way to give specific movement blocking message(s)’ topic on this same board.
Here is the way that I use for specific directions, another way may be better…
[code]Placid Room is a room with the printed name “The Placid Room”.
The description of the Placid Room is “This room is very quiet. Many people are sleeping on the floor. There is a doorless entryway to the north with two of the sleepy peeple laying in it.”;
the sleeping people are an undescribed thing in the Placid Room.
Understand “sleepy” as the sleeping people.
Before going north:
say “Ahem! That would wake them up!”;
stop the action.[/code]
That “stop the action.” statement is the key, it keeps the action from going on with a “You can’t go that way.”
If you want to change that default message too, you can do this… first get the Custom Library Messages by David Fisher library. It’s free and will help you a lot with changing the default messages.
Include the library, then do this:
Table of custom library messages (continued)
Message Id Message Text
LibMsg <cannot go that way> "You can't walk through a solid wall, now, can you?"
I don’t wanna too-confuse a new person, but rather than David Fisher’s extension, you could potentially use Ron Newcomb’s Default Messages extension, which is an updated rewrite of David’s, and a bit simpler and cleaner.
“Instead of going south, say such and such” works for me; though it always blocks going south, no matter where you are.
Is it possible that you’ve been using “Instead of going south from My Room” instead of “Instead of going south in My Room”? The two are slightly different; going south from My Room doesn’t happen when there isn’t a map connection south from My Room, going south in My Room does. (This is explained in the documentation at 7.13.)
Thank you all very much! I’ve been using ‘from’ instead of ‘in’ without realizing they were different, and I’d misunderstood the use of the ‘stop the action’ command.
I’ll definitely download that extension – I’ve been doing all sorts of silly things to simulate just that.
It’s also helpful to know that Before rules continue the action by default, while Instead rules stop the action by default. So if you use an Instead rule, you don’t need the “stop the action” phrase.