Suppressing "you can see.."

[stormfinger]

Hi
sometimes almost always i want to suppress “you can see” message when entering a room i have my own message what player can see… instead of doors i show him places that he can visit or doors if they are locked or closed… but im clueless how to disable games “you can see …” message

[HanonO (Hanon Ondricek)]

I will refer you to this topic until others chime in:

Removing the 'You can see a' messages

For the first, the easiest thing to do is to put square brackets around the item name in the room description – this tells Inform to display the printed name, and since it knows the item’s already been mentioned, it won’t mention it again in the “you san see” line (note that you’ll usually want to make these objects fixed in place so that the description doesn’t stop making sense if the player moves things around – though you can also put if statements in the description to manage this if needed…

[EphemeralHorror]

If you’re talking about stuff like this in particular, you can set “Initial appearances” for things. That helps pull them out of this list, though they return to it once handled as you can see here. That’s a good thing though, since as the example Hanon linked mentions you don’t want a set description breeding wild inconsistencies.

In the grander scheme of things, all of that kind of stuff is a function of the ‘looking’ action, which I believe plays automatically when you enter a room. Also, as you can see by me using it to show the change from handling the coin. You may want to consider looking (ehe) into that and its behaviour.

Hope that helps even a little bit!

Edit: Was a little busy while typing this, but since you were talking about doors in particular they can also have an “Initial Appearance” that rips them right out of the “You can also see…” text! Doesn’t even join it again when used, either!

Edit 2: Couldn’t find a good name for the value kind of “open” or “locked” at a moment’s notice (were any to exist), but that just gave me an excuse to throw around a second way to say values in the middle of a description. That’s why the door has a colour now. But yeah, throwing it in the description with the square brackets kicks it out of the ‘You can see…’ stuff, as mentioned.

(If you can’t tell, I felt a bit bad for being rushed during my initial response RIP…)

[stormfinger]

thank you for pointing those details up ill make sure i include it in my message …so all i have to do is instead of looking rule and point it to my message? im trying this way because for mobile phones there is just too much text that its actualy not needed and i want to remove doors from the message since they arent realy needed and actualy ive got chains for doors…so i do want to hide them…sometimes rooms are blocked with chains and sometimes they arent so if there is no chain i dont want them to pop up in description at all

[EphemeralHorror]

So just to clarify:

1. You potentially want absolutely NOTHING but the description you write.
2. You have chained doors and unchained doors, and if you have an unchained door you don’t want it mentioned at all. (…Or perhaps you don’t have doors as in-world entities, and instead they’re just a narrative function that only exists in the description of the chains. I’m going to operate on the idea that the doors exist for these examples, but it should be easy enough to tweak to your ends otherwise if I’m wrong.)

Working off of those assumptions I can say that an “instead of looking” rule would absolutely cut all of that stuff out. You can see I get something going here by throwing an if-statement in the description of the room that the looking action is now reading off (instead of doing all of its usual behaviours). This even seems to override the ‘dark room’ behaviour for the most part, though the status bar above will still say ‘darkness’ (not shown here unfortunately).

But yes. In the above example, you have the name of the location being printed as usual (easily removable behaviour if you so wish) and the description of whatever room you do it in.

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(The following is a bonus aside in the vein of my original examples.)

You might not find this gutted “looking” system ideal if players are capable of moving items between rooms. I might be wrong! That might not be a factor, and having items at the bottom may be causing you just as many problems length-wise! Still, I figured I’d mention one last easy thing should you decide to keep some of the usual ‘looking’ behaviour.

…Namely, that since doors are immobile… you could perhaps make them all “scenery”! And scenery doesn’t get listed like everything else! I added that bit in the “unchained” rules since this example was getting LONG, even after I took out the “instead of looking” rule to show this off.

Now in the event that you do go back to having the “looking” rules function normally, your doors won’t suddenly be listed again the moment an “if” statement cuts their bracketed name out of the room’s description!

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Hope some of this helps! There’s also the locale priority rules that you can use for more fine control… but I figure that since I’m not sure if you’re even interested in the standard “looking” functions anymore I won’t go on an additional tangent, ehe.

[stormfinger]

thank you very much