Avoiding Room Descriptions Upon Entering?

Hi there!

So i’m working on an IF 7 project and basically on start-up I have ti to where it gives a description of the room in more detail than i will in the actual description of the room. Then after that, that’s when you technically actually enter the room, so then it gives a description.

How do I avoid it giving the description of a room when you enter, but when you type “look” it gives the description?

Plus, if there is a different place i’m supposed to post issues like this, please direct me.

Hi, I’ve moved the post to the Inform 6 and 7 authoring subforum–that’s the place you’re looking for, if you’re posting about work in Inform 7!

For your substantive question, the initial room description is carried out by an automatic “looking” action, so an “instead of looking for the first time” rule will preempt it, and then allow looking to work normally thereafter. For instance:

[code]Lab is a room. The description of Lab is “Shiny, shiny lab, all descriptivey.” A rock is in Lab.

Instead of looking for the first time: say “Here’s some introductory text. You might try to LOOK now.”[/code]

Apologies if that’s not exactly what you meant! Also that this is a bit curt; Firefox decided to page me back automatically and deleted the post I had written.

Sometimes you might also want to use a “[first time]…[only]” substitution, which prints, well, the first time that that text gets printed, and only then. Like this:

Lab is a room. The description of Lab is "[First time]Here comes some extra text. [only]Here's the normal text."

If you want it for the whole game, I think you can still use “Use brief descriptions.” in the source. “Use superbrief descriptions.” I think will only show the room name, but LOOK will still work, as well as if the player knows to type VERBOSE to always get a room description.

See example 3, “Verbosity”
inform7.com/learn/man/WI_3_1.html

It’s “Use superbrief room descriptions”. This works, but the player can override it with VERBOSE. If you want it to be hard-wired, you could do something like this:

Carry out looking (this is the curtail room description rule):
	if the room-describing action is not the looking action: 
		stop the action.
The curtail room description rule is listed before the room description body text rule in the carry out looking rules.

(This won’t affect the initial “look” on startup – use matt w’s suggestion for that.)

Edit: on second thoughts, if you really want to prevent the player using the VERBOSE/BRIEF/SUPERBRIEF commands, you should probably just disable them, with a polite message.

Check preferring unabbreviated room descriptions:
       say "Sorry, that option is not available in this game." instead.

(and likewise for “abbreviated” and “sometimes abbreviated”).