When converting a (large-ish) 6G60 project to 6L02, I got a few dozen of these problems:
Confused error messages are par for the course, but the kicker on this one is that it doesn’t indicate a line in the text. The only way I can figure out to hunt this down is by steady process of elimination. Anyone else encountered this? Any ideas?
This bug report has a similar problem although with a slightly different error message: inform7.com/mantis/view.php?id=1280 Based on that it might have something to do with text substitutions?
That bug has nothing to do with text substitutions. I don’t think it’s related though anyway.
Maybe you’re writing “The description is…” (or some other property) and the compiler is assuming the wrong object?
Or you have a bare string, to set the initial appearance property, and the compiler is assuming the wrong object?
The following seems to be the minimal code to do it:
There is a room.
A memory is a kind of thing.
A memory is usually scenery.
Sadness is a memory.
Sadness is part of yourself.
Following up on maga’s test code, I added a room description to see what would happen:
[code]There is a room. “You are in a room.”
A memory is a kind of thing.
A memory is usually scenery.
Sadness is a memory.
Sadness is part of yourself.[/code]
I now get:
It compiles if you comment out either line 3 or line 5.
That’s a separate problem: you now have to explicitly say
The description of the room is "You are in a room."Once you add that, it reverts to the previous problem.
Ah. That’s what I get for shooting from the hip without doing my homework.
Seems to be this bug, which I filed a few days ago. Whenever you make a scenery object that’s a part of a person, Inform gets hopelessly confused about room descriptions.
Fortunately, parts don’t usually need to be scenery anyway, since they’re already undescribed - although I had to rewrite some complicated cases where I was using a kind in multiple settings.
I’ve been running into this problem a lot in one of my games. A few of the times it crops up I’ve managed to fix it, but in this example it’s really confused me:
[code]the bartender is a man in tavern of the lost soul. "A hulking man sporting a strange horn which grows from the centre of his forehead, clad in downtrodden garb which looks like it was retrieved from the Vienn River.
The rumours of mutations amongst the Ruins-folk clearly are more than rumours if this fellow is any indication. On the other side of the river, he could easily have the horn removed, but here it’s unlikely it could be done without killing him."[/code]
Any idea what’s causing the issue?
I think the problem is that the tavern is the last object mentioned in that sentence, so the following text is assumed to be the description of the tavern rather than the initial appearance of the bartender. If the tavern already has a description, that is a contradiction.
If I try your code I get no error.
Tavern of the Lost Soul is a room. "Spooky room."
the bartender is a man in tavern of the lost soul. "A hulking man sporting a strange horn which grows from the centre of his forehead, clad in downtrodden garb which looks like it was retrieved from the Vienn River.
The rumours of mutations amongst the Ruins-folk clearly are more than rumours if this fellow is any indication. On the other side of the river, he could easily have the horn removed, but here it's unlikely it could be done without killing him."This works as it should. The room’s description is “Spooky room”, and the bartender’s initial appearance is the two-paragraph text.
Hmm… that’s odd. I just experimented and when I moved the description of the bartender to directly following the entry for the tavern, it works fine (well, it runs into another error message later on, but not relating to the bartender or the tavern), yet moving the bartender text back to its original location brings back the error message.
With a bit more experimentation, I’ve found if I add “description is” before the actual description, this seems to work, but after doing this half a dozen times Inform has thrown a wobbly and given me the same error message for the bartender description.
I think I’m better going back to the previous version of Inform.
Please file a reproducible test case if you can.
Also note that when you’re defining things, the bare string defines an initial appearance, not a description.