Read = Examine

Authoring Inform 7
1

I have an object where “read obj” shall yield the same result as “examine obj”. Two questions on that.

  1. How do I achieve that?

  2. Which help search string would have brought up something helpful in the I7 documentation? I searched for “read” and “book” and “readable” and “inscription” and a gazillion of other words and combination of words and words with spaces in front or behind them, and I browsed through various topics being offered by the “help”, but I didn’t find anything that actually helped. Annoyed.

2

This is how Inform works by default. You have to do extra work to make “read” not be a synonym for “examine”.

To see what verbs are defined in the current game, look in the Index tab under “Actions”.

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3

As Zarf says, this is default behavior. If you want to change it so that READ doesn’t behave as a synonym for EXAMINE (like, you don’t want READ TREE to just spit out the description) there are a bunch of options, but the Reading Matter set of examples should be able to get you started.

As to your second question – like, how are you expected to find this stuff? – I think the indices are pretty helpful. There’s both an index of examples and a general index, and looking up “read” or “book” in either would point you in the right direction. If you prefer to use the documentation in the Windows IDE, you can get to the indices using the buttons in the upper-right of the documentation tab (they’re kind of tucked away and hard to find unless you’re looking for them).

Hope this helps!

4

Thanks for your answers! Learned something again! I have now found out the reason for my problem: Old code that I had forgotten about. I have defined “read” as an extra command, and going through the “Reading Matter” examples and trying around a little bit I found that “[description of the noun]” is what I had to use and what I had hoped to find in the help. Sorry for sounding grumpy - I was. :wink:

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5

That’s another reason why looking at the Index is useful – it will include any changes to the default rules added by yourself or extensions, and includes links to the source for things outside the standard rules and links to the documentation for things inside the standard rules – at least one of which should give you a hint as to how to modify things further.

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6

Another invaluable command is to type ACTIONS while test playing and Inform will tell you what actions it interprets from the player’s input and is trying and redirecting to at any given point.

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