understand 'verb noun' as 'other verb noun' problem in I7

Authoring Inform 7
1

Hi all, just started using I7, so I don’t really know what’s going on. Anyway, I have a room with a grate in the floor. The grate is fixed in place, but can be opened. I want the game to understand ‘move the grate’ as ‘open the grate’, instead of just telling the player that the grate is fixed in place. Is this possible? Everything I have tried has not worked.

Thanks!

2

The command “move the grate” gets mapped to the action of pushing the grate, so this should work:

Instead of pushing the grate: try opening the grate.

This will also map “push grate,” “shift grate,” “clear grate,” and “press gate” to opening the grate. That’s probably fine for your purposes, but if you don’t want any of those to work, you probably have to do something a little more complicated starting with:

Understand the command "move" as something new.

And you might also want this:

Instead of pulling the grate: try opening the grate.

which will catch “pull grate” and “drag grate.”

3

The command “move [something]” triggers the pushing action. You can redirect that action with an instead rule like Instead of pushing the grate: try opening the grate .
EDIT: Matt already said as much.

Alternatively you can have the game understand “move” in a new way when applied to doors or even to the grate specifically:

Understand "move [door]" as opening

will let the player open any doors with the command MOVE,

Understand "move [grate]" as opening

will let it open the grate (and nothing else) with that command.
EDIT: You can add such extra ways of understanding “move” without first having to declare it as something new; the context is a little a different in Matt’s example above.

4

Thanks a whole hell of a lot guys, it worked perfectly! I used

Understand “move [grate]” as opening

I had tried

Understand “move grate” as “open grate”

but obviously that was wrong for several reasons.