Inform 7: Asking about stuff

[Steve Hugg]

I've spent what seems like way too long trying to implement "ask
someone about someone" and I seem to be dense as one of my NPCs. Here's
what I came up with:

Asking it about the person is an action applying to two things.

Understand "ask [someone] about [any person]" as asking it about the
person.

Instead of asking someone about the person in the presence of the
person:
say "[noun] glances at [second noun]. 'I really can't talk now,' he
whispers."

Instead of asking someone about the person:
say "'[Second noun] is an outstanding citizen.'"

So far so good ... but the trouble starts when I try to ask about
someone in another room:

You can't reach into the <room where the other person resides>.

I thought the [any person] would allow me to reference objects in other
rooms -- but it doesn't seem to enable me to reach into them.

Of course, if the answer is listed plain as day in the docs, I'd be
glad to just get a hint.

Thanks!

[vaporware]

You're getting that error message because by default, you have to be
able to touch the object of an action. Change the definition to this
and it should work: "Asking it about the person is an action applying
to one thing and one visible thing."

However, that will reveal another problem: "asking someone about the
person in the presence of the person" is misinterpreted by Inform (you
might want to report this as a bug). It'll be true if you're asking
about a person in the presence of *any person*. Change it to "in the
presence of the second noun" as a workaround.

vw

[Steve Hugg]

Thanks, that did it. I don't know if it's neccessarily a bug unless one
of the design decisions for I7 is to accept any reasonable English
sentence -- but it's definitely a red herring :)