Responses in extensions

[Peter_Piers]

I may be missing something obvious, but…

[code]Include Tutorial Mode by Emily Short.

Place is a room.

can’t turn off tutorial mode when it is off rule response (A) is “Tutorial mode is already off.”.[/code]

That gives me an error like I7 has no idea what tutorial mode is, or even that I’m trying to edit a response. The full error goes:

Problem. The sentence ‘can’t turn off tutorial mode when it is off rule response (A) is “Tutorial mode is already off.”’ seems to be talking about a previously unknown room or thing called can’t turn off tutorial mode when it. Ordinarily, I would create this, but because the name contains the word ‘when’ or ‘while’ I’m going to say no.

That’s because this far more often happens by mistake than deliberately. For instance, people sometimes type lines like ‘Jumping when the actor is on the trampoline is high-jumping.’ But in fact although ‘jumping’ is an action, ‘Jumping when…’ is not - ‘when’ can’t be used here (though it can be used in rule preambles). So the sentence is instead read as making an object ‘jumping when the actor’ and putting it on top of another one, ‘trampoline is high-jumping’. This can lead to a lot of confusion.

If you genuinely do want an object whose name contains the word ‘when’, try something like: ‘In the box is a thing called When worlds collide.’

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Problem. You wrote ‘can’t turn off tutorial mode when it is off rule response (A) is “Tutorial mode is already off.”’ : but this seems to give something a name which contains brackets ‘(’ or ‘)’, which is not allowed since the potential for confusion with other uses for brackets in Inform source text is too high. (If you need, say, a room which the player sees as ‘Fillmore (West)’, you can get this effect with: ‘Fillmore West is a room with printed name “Fillmore (West)”.’)

I’m confused. I installed the extension, and can use it (it shows up in the game, working properly). I listed the extension before the response edit. Why doesn’t this method of editing a response work?

BTW, I can easily dive into the extension, copy-paste the whole code and do the changes I want, no problem. But I was wondering what I could have done wrong.

[matt_weiner (matt w)]

This looks like a bug in Inform concerning rules with “is” in their name. [EDIT: I initially said “when” but the culprit is “is.”] A workaround is to set the response using a “when play begins” instead of an initial declaration, like this:

[code]Include Tutorial Mode by Emily Short.

Place is a room.

When play begins: now can’t turn off tutorial mode when it is off rule response (A) is “Tutorial mode is already off.”.[/code]

I’ll file this as a bug, and also if I manage to get to revising the extension before the next bugfix release of Inform comes out, I’ll change the name of the rule. [EDIT: Now that I know “is” is the culprit, this will be simple–change “it is” to “it’s.”]

[zarf (Andrew Plotkin)]

Related to inform7.com/mantis/view.php?id=1750 , although I think that was problem with the word “have” rather than “when”.

[matt_weiner (matt w)]

Reported.

(By the way, I7 indeed has no idea what tutorial mode is, at least in the context of that declaration–“tutorial mode” is just part of the name of the rule and doesn’t get interpreted to have to do with the extension name or the mode in the extension. The problem is that it doesn’t realize you’re trying to edit a response–I’m pretty sure it’s parsing the sentence as

(can't turn off tutorial mode when it) is (off rule response (A) is "Tutorial mode is already off.").

and you’re getting errors because both sides of that are illegal object names.)

[Peter_Piers]

Oh, well, I’m glad to have been able to locate a bug. It’s also very good to know of the workaround. Many thanks!