I am currently making a game in I7 and I am having some trouble. This might be an easier thing to do than it seems, because I’ve seen it done in games and have no reason to believe it can’t work. I’ve been through what I think are the relevant sections in both manuals and I can’t seem to figure out exactly where I am going wrong.
What I have is this:
Instead of eating the [thing]:
say "Are you serious (y/n) ?";
if the player consents:
say "blah blah blah"; and
end the story finally saying "blah blah blah";
otherwise:
say "blah blah blah" instead;
What I get is this:
The phrase or rule definition ‘Instead of eating the [thing]’ is written using the ‘colon and indentation’ syntax for its 'if’s, 'repeat’s and 'while’s, but that’s only allowed if each phrase in the definition occurs on its own line. So phrases like ‘and end the story finally saying “blah blah blah”’ , which follow directly on from the previous phrase, aren’t allowed.
I have tried playing around with the placement of the (; and) and a few other things. I can make places where if the player consents, it does one thing and without consent does another. I can make the game end and say whatever I want to to say. I can’t for the life of me seem to combine the two and still have my game compile properly.
You don’t need that “and” after your semicolon. (It’s not valid Inform to put a conjunction after a semicolon, and technically it’s not correct English in this case either, although it’s still used from time to time.)
I would debate that the and after the semicolon isn’t proper English (most of my semicolon uses are in lists, and I’m not using American English, if that’s worth anything to you), but that seems like a poor way to pay you back for you help. Thank you very much for your help!
[rant=QUIBBLE]Conjunctions after semicolons can be correct (if the semicolons are being used to separate items containing commas in a list), but in other cases they almost always are not.[/rant]
[rant]I draft lots of legal correspondence and documents for my day job, so the conjunctions following semicolons often are involved in listing documents with long names and often along side instructions on how to fill them out or where they need to be sent. Also, at lest around here, much of our legislation consists of massive run-on sentences punctuated by semicolons rather than full stops. I bet that has coloured the parts of grammar that they didn’t specifically re-instruct me on in my legal-ese courses.[/rant]
Also, how did you get one that says quibble? It appears to be a rant box, but I can only make one that says rant. Share more of your programming secrets with a novice?
