User Friendly Ask/Tell Topic Definition

Authoring TADS
1

I am now working on my first ‘interactive’ conversation in my first IF game. At this point Alice is there with Dodo and others and (mainly as a learning experience) I want the player to be able to tell Dodo about getting dry. This will simply be a trigger that begins scripted conversations about drying, but the player gets to initiate different points of the conversation. My question is with topic definitions:

gettingDryTopic : Topic 'getting dry';

Is there a way to use ONE Topic object, but allow the player to use different phrases to ‘trigger’ that topic? So in the case above if the player types “tell dodo about getting dry” it works, but if they type “tell dodo about drying off” it doesn’t. Is there a way to extend this Topic object, or do I have to define multiple Topics then somehow use them all in my ask/tell object? Here is my full ask/tell code:

gettingDryTopic : Topic 'getting dry';

dodo : Person 'dodo bird/dodo' 'dodo bird' @seaOfTears
"The dodo bird is entertaining and a bit confused. He thinks he knows quite a lot, but he doesn't."
    isHim = true
    properName = 'Dodo Bird'
    globalParamName = 'dodo'
;
+ dodoDefault : ActorState
    isInitState = true
    specialDesc = "The dodo bird is staring at you, waiting for you to supply an answer."
;
+ AskTellTopic @gettingDryTopic
"
    You think about it a moment.
"
;
2 
gettingDryTopic : Topic 'getting dry';

The ‘getting dry’ text is actually a set of vocabwords in the same way as ‘dodo bird/dodo’.

Although, if you change it to ‘getting drying dry/off’ the topic will respond to “tell dodo about getting off”, so I’d suggest creating two different topics:

[code]gettingDryTopic : Topic ‘getting how to get dry’; //etc.

dryingOffTopic : Topic ‘drying dry off’;[/code]
And then including both in the topic list like so:

+ AskTellTopic [gettingDryTopic, dryingOffTopic] " You think about it a moment. " ;

3

Thank you! I’ll play around with this some more tonight. And thanks for including the code to refer to multiple topics that would have been my next question!