Preventing line breaks before "objects here"

Authoring Inform 7
#1

It’s going very well with Mr. Newcomb’s Default Messages extension! Again, thanks for the help with that, guys.

I’m attempting to describe non-held objects according to rather old-fashioned Infocom norms, by overriding each object’s normal appearance upon being encountered, like so:

First Object is a thing. “There is a first object here.”

So far, so good. Chiefly, I’d like to stop I7 from printing a line break before notifying the player of currently seen objects. In other words, this…

==========
Testing Room
You are standing in a featureless room. How unadventurous of you!

There is a first object here.

You can also see the second object here.

==========

…would instead read:

==========
Testing Room
You are standing in a featureless room. How unadventurous of you!
There is a first object here.
There is a second object here.

==========

I’ve tried every combination of periods/no periods and “[run paragraph on]” additions, and I just can’t get rid of those pre-object blank lines. Is there a “move cursor up one row” command, such as in BASIC, that’s not covered in the docs?

I’d also -love- to get rid of “You can also see,” just as I’ve excluded it in my wish-readout above, and simply have the game print my object’s description as I’ve typed it, even if it’s been picked up and dropped. I’ve tried this:

==========
Every turn:
now every thing is unmentioned.

…but it’s not working. I’m at a loss! Thanks for reading, all. The assistance I’ve received here thus far has been invaluable, and much appreciated.

[Edits were for extra clarification.]

#2

I too would like to be rid of the pre object spaces. Something about them just doesnt look right.

#3

To reset an object to its not-yet-picked-up appearance, you want to make it “not handled”.

However, it’s easier to define the appearance with a “rule for writing a paragraph about…” That’s permanent – it’s not affected by whether the object has been handled.

I can’t help you with the blank lines. Inform’s blank-line rules are hard to mess with.

#4

Thanks for the tip about object descriptions!

My obstacle is this. The only solution I’ve found is to include these extensions:

========
Include Room Description Control by Emily Short.
Include Single Paragraph Description by Emily Short.

(The latter evidently requires the former to work, if I’ve read the documentation correctly.)

This works beautifully, as [line break] merely has to be added before the initial appearance of each object (initial appearances are all I’d like to see, outside the player’s inventory). The line breaks are added because, again, I’m trying to list each room’s object(s) on separate lines under the room’s description, but include no blanks between them:

Test-Like Room
There is a first object here.
There is a second object here.

With the extensions included, this transpires perfectly upon initial room entry. However, for subsequent entries into the same room, the following new rule, which worked before the extensions were included, is now apparently ignored or overridden:

========
Rule for writing a paragraph about a thing (called item): say “[the initial appearance of the item]”.

Before the extensions were included, this successfully kept “You can also see…” from replacing my initial appearances.

The extensions also cause verbosity, even if a room has been entered before – although I have == Use BRIEF room descriptions. == in my code, which also worked before the extensions were included.

Any help would be extremely thanked and thanked. :slight_smile:

[Edits were again made for extra clarity.]

#5

I’ve modified the Single Paragraph Description extension to no longer consider whether or not an object has been handled before its initial appearance is printed. (You might want to try this extension, Livens; it squishes everything together nicely, and you can just decide where the carriage returns are by inserting [line break] in the right places.)

Now I’m just trying to figure out how to keep the extension from overriding BRIEF.