Inform Syntax: 1, Me: Several.

[angharad]

So, I'm writing this text adventure test gamelet (which is just a bunch of room and item descriptions) so I can play with Inform 7. I made it so that if you close the door, the room becomes dark. However, in the dark, you can't see the door to open it again! Why should you need to see it to open it?! I've tried mangling the scope. I've tried

Comments

[blue_condition]

If I was doing it I'd probably keep a list of objects that you have seen before - when you go into the room you "have seen" everything in there... would that work?

[angharad]

I dunno. I can try that later. The problem is that right now in the dark, "You can't see any such thing.".

[ex_trurl]

Ah, but can the door open you? (BBBoT reference, or is that only two Bs)

[iralith]

You are writing a text adventure because you are excellent. When I had my big text-adventure fling a couple of years ago, the fact that I never managed to learn Inform or TADS or whatever and write one myself is entirely down to the fact that I am not excellent. Go you.

[ex_trurl]

Uh, did you mean to reply to me or the parent?

[iralith]

To the parent-sorry about that.

[bonelesspuppy]

If it weren't for the wacky new syntax, I could tell you how to edit the basic verb OPEN to make it no longer light-dependent (TADS classes them as darkverbs, and I think Inform has a very similar designation). I have no idea how to handle verb-overwriting in Inform 7, though, and I am afraid to delve into a world where there are no curly braces and FOR loops.

[angharad]

There are for loops! It wouldn't be Turing complete without for loops (well, okay, it has while loops too, not to mention if statements)! (Nobody has any idea how to do anything in Inform 7 (except Zarf, Emily Short, and Graham Himself), so don't worry about that!) Example from the documentation:
The following lists the whereabouts of all men in lighted rooms:

repeat with suspect running through the men who are in a lighted room (called the scene) begin;
say "[The suspect] is in [the scene].";
end repeat.

[bonelesspuppy]

I embrace this for loop only cautiously, as I cannot escape the sense that, when I look at sample Inform 7 code, I am reading the Usenet posts of a conspiracy theorist who starts off calm and rational but quickly descends into frothing madness.

[angharad]

Nono, see, it's mad in a good, trippy way: like Haskell!

[hitchhiker]

yeesh, is that the new inform syntax? looks uncomfortably verbose to me - I hope there are still algollike shorthand alternatives available.