§6.4. Looking
Looking is quite a complicated command, since the production of a room description takes many steps. A detailed description of this process may be found in the Room Descriptions section.
By convention, a player sees full descriptions of rooms he enters more than once, but may type BRIEF in order to see shorter descriptions, and SUPERBRIEF tells the game never to print room descriptions at all. VERBOSE restores the default behavior.
These conventions are not always appropriate, however, especially in works where experiencing a changing environment is essential. The use option
Use brief room descriptions.
changes the default behavior so that rooms are not always described fully to the player. Verbosity demonstrates how this works.
The player always has the option of turning room descriptions to BRIEF or SUPERBRIEF mode. Verbosity 2 demonstrates how we might remove the player's ability to change the default behavior.
See Room Descriptions for a detailed description of how Inform creates room descriptions and how to change the results
See Going, Pushing Things in Directions for ways to change just those room descriptions that are shown as the result of the player's movement
See Memory and Knowledge for ways to change the room description in response to the player character's knowledge at any given stage of play
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Suppose that we want the player always to see full room descriptions, even if he tries to reset the defaults -- perhaps because there is vital information there which he will miss if he turns off full-length room descriptions. To do this, we might want to remove the standard behavior of the three actions associated with BRIEF, SUPERBRIEF, and VERBOSE, replacing them with explanatory messages about how the game behaves. We cannot use Instead to override these actions, because Instead rules do not apply to actions out of world. Instead, we will want to remove and replace the carry out rules. We can do this easily by going to the Actions Index, looking up the detail panel for, say, "preferring abbreviated room descriptions", and click the "unlist" button to paste in the sentence that will remove this rule from the rulebook. Let's remove all three of the carry out rules and substitute our own:
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Suppose that we want the player always to see full room descriptions, even if he tries to reset the defaults -- perhaps because there is vital information there which he will miss if he turns off full-length room descriptions. To do this, we might want to remove the standard behavior of the three actions associated with BRIEF, SUPERBRIEF, and VERBOSE, replacing them with explanatory messages about how the game behaves. We cannot use Instead to override these actions, because Instead rules do not apply to actions out of world. Instead, we will want to remove and replace the carry out rules. We can do this easily by going to the Actions Index, looking up the detail panel for, say, "preferring abbreviated room descriptions", and click the "unlist" button to paste in the sentence that will remove this rule from the rulebook. Let's remove all three of the carry out rules and substitute our own:
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