Hey All–
Yet again, shockingly, I am having issues with speech in Inform. There are no NPCs in my scenario, and I’d like the player to be able to SAY something, but but not to yourself. How can I remove the implicit (to yourself) when saying things when no one else is around?
I’m reading through the Standard Rules about talking, and wow, are they annoying. There’s something about this particular area that puts my inner idiot in charge.
The only thing I could think of was to piggyback on my last thread about talking by doing this:
Does the player mean answering yourself that:
It is very unlikely.
That compiles but is ignored. I’m guessing that isn’t working because Inform is looking for someone to be the talkee, and if there’s no one else around, it doesn’t care that I said said not to do that?
Maybe I want to say that some rule does nothing, but what rule?
I don’t know if this helps, but there is an extension called “Inanimate Listeners” by Emily Short.
I wonder if you could make an inanimate listener that is part of the character or part of a backdrop that is everywhere and thus always in scope for the player to talk to. That might short circuit some of the problems you’re having. You could change the “printed name” of the listener to whatever you want possibly?
Hmm. Wouldn’t that just cause Inform to do the implicit (to the inanimate listener) instead? I’m glad to know about that extension (I can already think of another place to use it!), but I don’t want the PC to address anyone or anything when SAYING something in this case.
Not especially intuitively, “say” and friends correspond to the answering it that action, which is an action applying to one thing and one topic. You’ll want to Understand the command "say" as something new. and then connect it to a new action applying to nothing.