§12.11. Making actions work for other people
The "photographing" action now works very nicely when the player does it. But not when others try. Suppose that neither the player, nor Clark Gable, is holding the camera:
>photograph clark
You can hardly photograph without a camera, now can you?
>clark, photograph me
>
An uncanny silence. What has happened is that the rules written so far are all implicitly restricted to the player only. This is because when we write -
Check photographing:
if the camera is not carried:
say "You can hardly photograph without a camera, now can you?" instead.
the action is "photographing", not "Clark photographing". In the next few sections we shall see how to make the rules work nicely for everybody. This is a little bit harder, so it should be noted right away that in many projects there is no need. In a game which has no other characters who succumb to persuasion, for instance, only the player will ever try the action.
![]() | Start of Chapter 12: Advanced Actions |
![]() | Back to §12.10. Action variables |
![]() | Onward to §12.12. Check rules for actions by other people |
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Inform has built-in commands for other people, and sometimes we may want to adjust the way these work without completely disabling and replacing the command. Suppose, for instance, that instead of
we'd like someone taking inventory to report what he's got, thus:
To do this, we could replace the built-in report rule with a different one.
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Inform has built-in commands for other people, and sometimes we may want to adjust the way these work without completely disabling and replacing the command. Suppose, for instance, that instead of
we'd like someone taking inventory to report what he's got, thus:
To do this, we could replace the built-in report rule with a different one.
Inform has built-in commands for other people, and sometimes we may want to adjust the way these work without completely disabling and replacing the command. Suppose, for instance, that instead of
we'd like someone taking inventory to report what he's got, thus:
To do this, we could replace the built-in report rule with a different one.
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