I am having trouble using ‘known’ in either an understand statement or as a test condition within an action. I have seen and read several posts about similar issues, copied some, but they have not helped or worked. Apologies for such a newbie question.
(I am an experienced programmer but new to Inform.)
Accusing with is an action applying to one visible thing and one visible thing.
Understand "accuse [any suspect] with [any poison]" as accusing with.
Carry out accusing with:
If the noun is not the murderer and the noun is known:
say "Wrongly accused!";
otherwise say "blah blah blah".
This example just seems to always fall through, even if the noun is in the room.
The example works if I leave out the ‘known’ part.
The example works if I leave out ‘any’ in the understand and put the person in scope. (Putting every person met in scope causes an error, too many tests, but if I could do that efficiently, might be a [clumsy] solution.)
Trying this:
Understand “accuse [any known suspect] with [any poison]” as accusing with.
results in ‘That noun did not make sense in this context’
Is it possible I don’t have Epistemology? Do I need to include/activate it?
Yeah, ‘known’ is not built-in to Inform. You have probably read examples that were using Epistemology, an extension that defines it.
If you
Include Epistemology by Eric Eve
You now have known, unknown, familiar and unfamiliar, seen and unseen as adjectives that can be used for Things, but you will need to read the docs to see that they do what you want them to do.
The summary of it is that if something is seen or familiar, it is known. Otherwise, that thing is unknown. Seeing is achieved by the player seeing it in person (by it ever being visible to them.) Familiarity is something you, the author can set. So say the player has never seen John, but another character tells them about John, you can say ‘now john is familiar’ and now John will be considered Known. Known is a condition that follows the setting of the other flags, not something that can be set in itself.
Thank you, Wade. At least I know I can get help when I need it! Sorry for the red herring.
BTW, really enjoying this stuff. I played Dungeon on DEC-20 38 years ago at DEC – the last electronic game I really liked. I didn’t know there was a kit to make my own. Good stuff, having a blast learning it.
That’s cool. It’s always interesting on this forum to see all the different histories people have with this kind of game. Some people are new to IF, some never stopped playing them, and some didn’t realise they were still going.
