[I7 6L02] Changing the pronoun with adaptive pronouns

I’m working on something third-person, using the new “now the story viewpoint is third person singular” command. The problem is, I don’t like the way pronouns are used.

>push wall She can't see any such thing.

I’d really like it to print the printed name of the noun in place of “she”.

>push wall The Countess Examplia can't see any such thing.

Right now, the only way I know to fix this is to rewrite the default messaging for everything in the Standard Library… which negates most of the reason to use the story viewpoint setting.

Does anyone have a brilliant way to just tweak the pronoun?

Pronouns are defined in the extension “English Language”. By replacing the relevant parts of that (using the “Section … in place of …” syntax) you can change the definitions of we, us, ours, etc. to use the printed name of the player.

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Perfect, thank you!

I hope it’s OK to bump old threads like this. Complete rookie here - hello!

The original thread-starter asked the very question I was wondering about, but I don’t entirely understand the solution kindly given here. I can find the English Language extension mentioned above, but I can’t find anything in it relating to personal pronouns other than the listed ‘neuter’, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ genders.

What should I change/add to the English Language extension to prompt the parser to use my character’s name consistently instead of ‘he’? I’m afraid I’m not sure what the “Section … in place of …” syntax is.

I’ve been experimenting with Inform 7 for a little over a week (lots of fun!) and have no previous coding experience, so apologies if this is a ridiculous question for any reason.

Welcome!

Not a ridiculous question at all. “Section” is a heading. You can use headings to organize the source code into manageable parts. See the second half of this chapter from Writing with Inform for more details.

Relevant to your question, writers of extensions often use headings because they can be referred to in the source text, and replaced. If, for example, an extension looked like this:

All My Animals by Ima Person

Section 1 - Cats

A cat is a kind of thing.

Section 2  - Cats Are Called Bosch

The printed name of a cat is usually “Bosch”.

But I want my cats to be named something else by default, I could put this in my source code:

Section 2  - Cats Are Called Gaston (in place of Section 2 in All My Animals by Ima Person)

The printed name of a cat is usually “Gaston”.

It would replace the matching section in the original extension, so I can name my cats whatever I like. See this chapter for more examples.

Regarding the English Language extension - given that this thread is so old, pronouns are probably defined in a different place nowadays. I’m not sure where, so can’t help with that part unfortunately. However, there have been a few more recent threads on adapting/overwriting pronouns which may give you ideas. See here for one.

Oh, that sort of Section! Got it. I’ve been using Volumes, Books and Parts for organisation so your explanation makes sense - thank you.

I’ll have search around for more recent discussions of this topic, then. I’ve noticed subsequently, too, that the parser sometimes refers to the player as ‘you’ - ‘What do you want to ask NPC for?’ - even when the story viewpoint is third person singular. That’s what I get for choosing a less conventional viewpoint for my first stab at IF.