Advanced Said() Strings - Part 1

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Advanced Said() Strings - Part 1
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More About Said Statements

This chapter explains some common Said usage patterns that aren't fully explained in the other tutorials.

"Look" vs. "Look thing"

Often, you might want to enclose all your 'look' handlers in one if statement, but still support just "look" all by itself.

Code:

(if (Said 'look>')
	(if (Said '/wall') (Print {The wall is covered in paint.}))
	(if (Said '/floor') (Print {The floor is covered in dust.}))
	(if (Said '[/!*]') (Print {You are in a room with a floor and a wall.})) ; this will handle just "look" by itself
	(if (Said '/*') (Print {You don't see anything interesting about it.})) ; this will handle "look anyword"
)

If you wanted to handle 'look around' just like look, you could do:

Code:

(if (Said 'look>')
	(if (Said '/wall') (Print {The wall is covered in paint.}))
	(if (Said '/floor') (Print {The floor is covered in dust.}))
	(if (Said '[/around]') (Print {You are in a room with a floor and a wall.})) ; this will handle just "look" by itself, and also "look around"
	(if (Said '/*') (Print {You don't see anything interesting about it.}))
)

Note that more specific Said clauses should always come before more general ones.

More complex Said strings

Consider the following example:

Code:

(if (Said 'give/food/dog')
	(Print {You give the food to the dog.})
)

One thing to note is that the order of words in the Said string doesn't necessarily match the order that the words are typed in by the user. There is more meaning to the Said string than that. The above clause will respond positively to the user typing "Give food to the dog", or even "Give dog the food". However, surprisingly (and fortunately), it will not match "Give food the dog". Rather than the particular word order in a sentence, the three parts of the above clause correspond to sentence parts.

Similarly:

Code:

(if (Said 'point<up/flashlight')
	(Print {You point the flashlight up, and see something curious.})
)

This will respond to "point flashlight up", but not "point up flashlight". (Note: FreeSCI may have some bugs here that make it behave differently than the Sierra parser).

That sums up more about said statements.