What am I doing wrong? -- I7

Authoring Inform 7
1

I’ve been playing around with Inform 7 for about a year, but I’m just starting to work with conversations with NPCs. The following fragment of code illustrates a problem I’m having:

“hellotest” by Me

Include Conversation Package by Eric Eve
This Place is a room.
Joe is a man. Joe is in This Place.
A Gadget is a familiar thing.
The ask-suggestions of Joe are {self-suggestion, the gadget}.

It compiles just fine, but when I try to say hello to Joe I get the correct list of suggestions, followed by a cryptic statement that it doesn’t recognize a verb. To wit:

hellotest
An Interactive Fiction by Me
Release 1 / Serial number 110508 / Inform 7 build 6G60 (I6/v6.32 lib 6/12N) SD

This Place
You can see Joe here.

hello, joe
(addressing Joe)
You say hello to Joe.

(You could ask him about himself or the Gadget.)

That’s not a verb I recognise.

I’m probably missing something pretty basic, but any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Robert Rothman
2

Inform is parsing your command line as two separate commands – ‘hello’ (to which it responds as expected, implicitly addressing the NPC who is in the room), followed by ‘joe’, which is a command it doesn’t recognize.

There’s an extension that flips inputs of this type (‘hello, joe’) to a type that Inform understands (‘joe, hello’). I don’t remember offhand what that extension is.

3

It’s Reversed Persuasion Correction by Juhana Leinonen.

4

Thanks. It looks like I got the coding right, it was the “playing” that I got wrong.

I knew (or at least thought I knew) that the conversation extensions I included broadened the class of formulations that the parser would accept to start a conversation. For some reason, I thought that that broadened class included the “hello, Joe” formulation. Somehow I never even thought of testing it with the more traditional “Joe, hello.”