Firstly, I’m new here, so hello!
Secondly, my question is basically what I put in the subject: I want a door to be lockable and unlockable from one side but not the other. That is, there is not even a keyhole or lock on one side of the door, so it should act as it were not lockable at all from that side.
I have been able to achieve the basic functionality with a Before statement–that is, preventing the player from locking or unlocking the door from one side–but the problem is that the game still runs the command clarification before doing this. So, for example, if I type “unlock door” while standing on the wrong side, the game will either come back with “What do you want to unlock the door with?” or it will give me a command clarification parenthetical before printing the message that there is no lock on this side. Desired behavior is for the game to reject all the attempts to unlock the door from that side, before even running a clarification check. So when I type “unlock door,” it should immediately come back with “There is no lock/keyhole on this side of the door.” or “The door can’t be unlocked from this side.” To the best of my knowledge, though, nothing comes before “Before,” so I’m not sure what I need to do here to circumvent the standard behavior.
I did take a look at Emily Short’s Locksmith extension to see if I could figure something out based on that (particularly the locking/unlocking keylessly stuff), but unfortunately my Inform Fu is weak (that is, I’m still trying to get a handle on the language). I imagine that this can’t be too hard to do, since it seems like a pretty basic thing. After all, all doors in rooms meant for detaining the occupants act this way.
Thanks in advance for any help, and apologies for asking what is probably a stupid question.