Second noun?

Authoring Inform 7
1

The coding for my spell casting I have written to accept two ways to cast a spell:

The first way to do this is to use the name of the spell as the action – i.e. frotz something:

frotzing is an action applying to one thing.  understand "Frotz [something]" as frotzing.

the other way is to cast the spell on something:

Casting is an action applying to two things.  understand "Cast [something] on [something]" as casting.

But I have a spell (levitating hand) that doesn’t need a second noun, the player would just type “cast levitating hand”. But there is no second noun needed.

The other way would be to treat levitating hand as a verb, which doesn’t really work either, no direct object is needed.

How to code something that uses the same action “cast” but with no direct object ([noun] or [second noun])?

It is possible? Is there a way that I’m not seeing?

1 Like
2

I think the easiest way is to just define a new action with a single object that uses the same grammar. Like:

Monocasting is an action applying to one thing.  Understand "cast [something]" as monocasting.

This can potentially get a little confusing though, so defining sub-kinds of spells and altering the understand grammar accordingly might be a good idea (like, defining monocast and dual-cast spells as kinds of spell and then making clear which goes where). I admit I haven’t messed around with same-grammar actions in a bit so possibly it’ll work fine out of the box!

3 Likes
3

Thank you for your help!

4

@kamineko built a spellcasting system in his first game and later wrote a lot about doing that that may be helpful to you. I couldn’t find the exact posts to link to now though. And I did try reasonably hard! I will send a potted history of my failed attempts to kaminenko so he may be able to make it easier to get at. In the meantime, I hope by dinging him in this post he or someone else can share the link.

-Wade

2 Likes
5

Thank you!

6

Hi! The posts are about some pretty messy design in Repeat the Ending, and how I hope to improve upon it. They are related to your question (I’m also interested in dropping a second noun), but the design is quite different from yours. Still, it might be interesting to see how somebody else approached dealing with nouns and magic.

Magic systems are fun. I look forward to checking out your game!

3 Likes
7

Another option, which Scroll Thief uses, is this:

Understand "cast [something]" as casting.
Rule for supplying a missing second noun when casting:
    now the second noun is the location.

Now CAST FILFRE in the Dark Tower will map to “casting filfre at the Dark Tower”.

5 Likes