[I7] Finding your Inform 7 / Simple Chat bug

-
I just spent a lot of time finding out where a certain bug in my Inform 7 program came from, and I'd thought I'd post it online so people who do the same thing wrong as I can more easily find a solution.

Here's the deal:

If you have an "Instead of doing anything except ..." rule in your code which is active at the beginning of play, and you are using the Simple Chat extension, the result will be that none of your conversation options ever show up in the game. Not even when the "Instead ..." rule is turned off by the time you start a conversation.

The reason for this is that Simple Chat initialises your conversations at the beginning of the game, using the "preparing" action. If you have implicitly disallowed that action, by not putting it in your "except" clause, this initialisation will fail, and no nodes will ever be visible.

The solution is to rewrite your rule as "Instead of doing anything except preparing, ...".

(But I am a bit worried now about using this kind of rule, since it doesn't just stop actions initiated by the player, but also who knows what hidden actions occuring in the background.)

Comments

  1. Anonymous5 June 2008 at 18:40

    (But I am a bit worried now about using this kind of rule, since it doesn't just stop actions initiated by the player, but also who knows what hidden actions occuring in the background.)

    Inform by default doesn't do "hidden actions occurring in the background": actions in the standard rules are all things triggered by the player directly or indirectly. (An implicit take would be indirect -- since it's generated in response to another action. But the player knows that it is happening, and it results from the player's command.)

    What makes this case weird is that Simple Chat uses an action (rather than an activity or a rulebook) to handle what is a behind-the-scenes bit of coding. This is a bit eccentric.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Victor Gijsbers5 June 2008 at 21:05

    Okay, that's very good to hear. (I already emailed Mark about that action, because I think it can easily be removed in favour of only activities.)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Michael Martin6 June 2008 at 02:31

    Note that 5T18 has an additional bug relating to "doing anything except" that large works may need to compensate for. Vaporware and I both have workarounds (his in I6 to the library, mine in I7 as an in-application workaround) on the newsgroups.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Keeping the narrative pressure on

-
I played another session of Trollbabe yesterday, and I would like to take the opportunity to write a little bit about GMing this game (and similar narrativist games). This is not a worked out manifesto so much as an attempt to think through an approach that I've been taking more or less instinctively. First, some context. This game was online, with two people I had never played with before: Judith and Katy. Actually, it's not quite true that I never played with Judith. I've known her for some 38 years, and possibly the first roleplaying I was ever engaged in was on a vacation with her family and my family. She acted as a kind of story guide, and I and her brother Adriaan played characters in an unfolding short story. I was thrilled by the possibilities inherent in such an activity, but it would take more time before I really discovered the world of tabletop RPGs. Both Judith and Katy played a bunch of roleplaying games before, though as far as I can judge they were all fai...
Read more

Walter Benjamin, "Der Erzähler" (The Storyteller)

-
In the comments to my last post, Ian mentioned an essay by Walter Benjamin , Der Erzähler ( The Storyteller ). Benjamin was an important German philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century; he wrote on a wide range of topics, but his best-known work is probably his essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (it is widely cited as The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction , but The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility would have been a better translation). Der Erzähler is a very rich and complex essay. It claims to be a reflection on the work of Nikolai Lesskow (in English known as Leskov, I believe); but it also touches on the difference beween a story (in the sense that a storyteller tells stories; Erzählung , not Geschichte ) and a novel, on the communicability of experience, on the role of death in modern life, on the nature of wisdom, on the relation between man and nature, and on several other topics. All...
Read more

Thoughts on a Trollbabe session

-
Yesterday, I played a second session of Trollbabe with Erik and Michiel, even more delightful than the first. ( Trollbabe . I dislike the title of the game, to be frank, but it's the only thing about it to dislike. Let me stress that the whole point of the game is that you're playing strong, independent women. With horns.) To give you an impression of the context, let me say that both Erik and Michiel are very good friends of mine, and that we've done a fair amount of roleplaying before, though mostly D&D. In fact, the two of them have played various editions of D&D almost exclusively, and neither had any previous GMing experience. That was about to change. In the first session, I GMed their characters Rolda (Michiel) and Vekir (Erik), who were together in a single adventure -- something that is not a given in Trollbabe . This time, we were going to do the same thing, but in addition I would also get to play a character, one adventuring at a different location. Mi...
Read more