To say talk to instead

Authoring Inform 7
1

Hey All–

Almost all of my dialogue is done with a TALK TO command. But I have some places where I need the player to SAY something to somebody, and I gleaned from examples that “To say talk to instead:” is the language. And it works fine.

But I cannot find the syntax for restricting saying something to somebody. For instance, I have a character in the game who I never want the player to say anything to, and the program stubbornly insists on picking that character first to say something to.

I’d like to do something like this:

Does the player mean saying something to Bobby:
	it is very unlikely.

But that throws an error. My “Does the player mean talking to Bobby: it is very unlikely” rule doesn’t cover this. And I’ve tried numerous variations on this with no success. What’s the language for this?

2

I think the built-in action you’re looking for is “answering someone that” – like if you type SAY BLARG TO FRED, the ACTIONS command shows you that that’s parsed as “answering Fred that ‘blarg’”. So this will get past the compiler:

Does the player mean answering Bobby that:
   It is very unlikely.

From your post I’m not sure if that gets everything done that you need it to, but it’s easy to write Instead rules or whatever else as needed.

4 Likes
3

Yep, that’s it. Huh. I never would have guessed that “saying” belonged to “answering”. So many quirky things.
Thanks again!

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