§7.6. Reading and talking
A few actions apply not to items alone, but also involve what might be called conversation. The first is the one used for looking things up in books (which is conversation of a kind, even if the author is not present): "consulting ... about ...". For example,
After consulting the book about "grove", say "The Grove is a sacred yadda, yadda. There's a tree, that sort of thing. Wisdom."
After consulting the book about "future events", say "It's a bit, what's the word? Delphic."
Note that what follows "about" here is a piece of text in double-quotes, and not the name of something. It can be almost any text at all, and in fact we shall later see (in the chapter on "Understanding") that we can match complicated patterns of words, too.
Similar actions are used for conversing with people:
After asking the Sybil about "verses", say "She blushes."
After telling the Sybil about "persians", say "She nods gravely."
After answering the Sybil that "I am mad", say "She sighs."
These would be produced by commands like "ask sybil about verses", "tell sybil about persians" and "answer i am mad". Answering is little-used except that it also catches commands like "sybil, something unrecognized", which inexperienced players sometimes type. Asking and telling, however, are important actions and the difference between them is often worth preserving. If you would prefer to make "tell sybil about X" do the same as "ask sybil about X", the following rule would serve:
Instead of telling the Sybil about something, try asking the Sybil about it.
Games with a lot of conversation often involve great heaps of rules like the ones above, which can be repetitious to type out. We shall also later see (in the chapter on "Tables") that we can tabulate questions and answers in a much more concise way, if we prefer.
See Topic columns for table-based ways to store and retrieve conversation
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The following relies on quite a number of features we haven't met yet: tables, rules for printing names, instructions for understanding the player's commands. It is offered simply as an example of how a fully implemented book might be handled in Inform.
With this "topic understood" phrase, we're telling Inform to print back the word or phrase that the player was attempting to look up. This overrides the more general default response, "You discover nothing of interest in the book." We now have the essential elements to construct whatever books we like. Now let's have an example of a specific book:
We will come back to the idea of tables and table names later, but for now the important thing is that we have instructed Inform to look up its answers to consulting the bird guide in this form:
The topic column is a bit special: it matches the player's input, and is not meant to be printed out again. Topic columns will be discussed further in the chapter on Tables. (Note also that, however it may appear in the documentation, the topic column should not be spanning multiple lines in our source text.) We may also compress long or complicated topics by creating bracketed abbreviations, and in fact it's useful to do so now, to explain the red token we just used:
This technique is discussed further in the chapter on Understanding. If we wanted more books, we could define those in the same way, giving each its own separate contents table to be used for consultation. But for the sake of the example we will keep it simple, and move on to the scenario itself:
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The following relies on quite a number of features we haven't met yet: tables, rules for printing names, instructions for understanding the player's commands. It is offered simply as an example of how a fully implemented book might be handled in Inform.
With this "topic understood" phrase, we're telling Inform to print back the word or phrase that the player was attempting to look up. This overrides the more general default response, "You discover nothing of interest in the book." We now have the essential elements to construct whatever books we like. Now let's have an example of a specific book:
We will come back to the idea of tables and table names later, but for now the important thing is that we have instructed Inform to look up its answers to consulting the bird guide in this form:
The topic column is a bit special: it matches the player's input, and is not meant to be printed out again. Topic columns will be discussed further in the chapter on Tables. (Note also that, however it may appear in the documentation, the topic column should not be spanning multiple lines in our source text.) We may also compress long or complicated topics by creating bracketed abbreviations, and in fact it's useful to do so now, to explain the red token we just used:
This technique is discussed further in the chapter on Understanding. If we wanted more books, we could define those in the same way, giving each its own separate contents table to be used for consultation. But for the sake of the example we will keep it simple, and move on to the scenario itself:
The following relies on quite a number of features we haven't met yet: tables, rules for printing names, instructions for understanding the player's commands. It is offered simply as an example of how a fully implemented book might be handled in Inform.
With this "topic understood" phrase, we're telling Inform to print back the word or phrase that the player was attempting to look up. This overrides the more general default response, "You discover nothing of interest in the book." We now have the essential elements to construct whatever books we like. Now let's have an example of a specific book:
We will come back to the idea of tables and table names later, but for now the important thing is that we have instructed Inform to look up its answers to consulting the bird guide in this form:
The topic column is a bit special: it matches the player's input, and is not meant to be printed out again. Topic columns will be discussed further in the chapter on Tables. (Note also that, however it may appear in the documentation, the topic column should not be spanning multiple lines in our source text.) We may also compress long or complicated topics by creating bracketed abbreviations, and in fact it's useful to do so now, to explain the red token we just used:
This technique is discussed further in the chapter on Understanding. If we wanted more books, we could define those in the same way, giving each its own separate contents table to be used for consultation. But for the sake of the example we will keep it simple, and move on to the scenario itself:
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