Quoll Work Thread, 2025-02-01 #3 - 2025-02-01 21:12
Wow, this bug is a fucking pain.
To my surprise, my belief that this used to work turned out to not be true. I rolled back to the commit where I added the test I was failing on, and it failed even there; I must have not noticed it. It is completely possible that there is a point where I broke this but it would be too many commits to check to find out.
I have tried a lot of different ways to work around the issue, mostly by adding and removing Does the player mean
Rules, but I eventually gave up on those because those Rules are indeed running, but the parser still chooses
implicit-asking. But I think the thing that is going to get me to pull back and just let this become a known issue
is that typing the command “ASK ABOUT CD” versus “ASK ABOUT CDS” does work. Absolutely confounding. (Being at all
more explicit and saying “ASK ABOUT MISSING CDS“ is another thing that works, so at least there is a clear workaround.)
This implies the issue might legitimately be a reluctance to ask about the CDs in plural, which is the whole reason I have a separate Subject to cover that. But I’m thinking that since it can’t decide between the CDs in plural versus the Subject it chooses neither, which is the worst outcome, because asking about either would work as expected.
Additionally, I did indeed look at the Inform 6 code, particularly a low-level Rule named generate action rule, but it
is pretty impenetrable and hands off work to the actual parser object. At that point, I would probably be better off
trying to understand it by looking at the Inform 6 literate source code. Which I am honestly considering despite how
much this will further pull me off schedule because this is such a fundamental break in my understanding of how this
works with a very clear failure to correctly parse a very natural way to phrase this command.
It’s pretty much why I’m incredibly leaning to not doing the next game in this series in Inform 7. So much time has been lost to issues particular to it, and as much as I really like the thematic aspect of typing to the PC through a text interface, at some point you have to cut your losses.
Eh, I’ll probably sit and think about it some, but this is pretty frustrating. Probably the end for work tonight as well, but it was good that I looked!
ETA 2025-02-01, 21:53: OK, I did something drastic and completely removed all commands that lead to the implicit-asking
action and sure enough I got the response “You can’t use multiple objects with that verb”… Now to think how to work
around that, if I can. Work is back on the menu friends! (Perhaps after a break…)
ETA 2025-02-01, 22:42: Eh, I am already in slack mode playing mahjong, so we’ll look at this next time.