check / revise default "do nothing" messages?

[pahp]

The message "Futile" is not very helpful as it suggests that something might be pointless. Maybe we could find a different message for this... but in general maybe we should check all such default "nope" messages to make sure that they're maximally helpful / sensical.

[spacehobo]

The message in question has a default set in messages.h. You can define these constants above the import of puny.h. We can make our own file to include there (the way I did for help.h) if we decide too many of them need overriding.

[Saturn-99]

I've found another instance of this, and learned that issue #107 was actually one of these issues. This was the same message it gave me for the plunger, I believe this is some sort of default response.

[spacehobo]

@Saturn-99 I've added instructions to Len's computer so that it advises switching it on, So perhaps we can keep the mvp tag on #163 and demote this slightly?

[Saturn-99]

@spacehobo Is there a way we can blanket change the message? This is a default message that appears everywhere in the game and manually going through and changing it on every item that it appears when it shouldn't would be a lot of extra work.

[spacehobo]

@spacehobo Is there a way we can blanket change the message?

@Saturn-99 which message? The one you screenshotted is one I created, as a default for the use verb. You can see the definition here. We can change the default, but it was designed with the intention that either we provide specific responses to use foo or we commit to the object being unusable.

The Futile message is from when you try to throw an animate creature, like yourself. That shows up here, and is pretty trivial to override if we think it's likely to cause a problem.

[Saturn-99]

@spacehobo Is there a way we can blanket change the message?

@Saturn-99 which message? The one you screenshotted is one I created, as a default for the use verb. You can see the definition here. We can change the default, but it was designed with the intention that either we provide specific responses to use foo or we commit to the object being unusable.

The Futile message is from when you try to throw an animate creature, like yourself. That shows up here, and is pretty trivial to override if we think it's likely to cause a problem.

@spacehobo Specifically the "Many of the objects... You won't need to do anything with it." message, that is the one I see the most often I think. Also the Futile message appears when attempting to throw non-animate objects sometimes too.

[spacehobo]

@Saturn-99 OK, well the "Many of the objects..." line is here: https://github.com/UMDLARS/one_night_in_sf/blob/main/help.h#L186-L189 and I think the solution is to do more fixes such as #174 did here: https://github.com/UMDLARS/one_night_in_sf/pull/174/files#diff-a027df5b87ceff2dad568d6fcdb3ef3a22d89cd212a050a936330731221c6732

But if you want to change that default in some way to guide the player better, that's just done around line 186 of help.h.

The MSG_THROW_ANIMATE is something we could put in the Constants area, before we Include "globals.h". As you can see in https://github.com/johanberntsson/PunyInform/blob/master/lib/messages.h#L26-L28 the main library only sets that "Futile." message if it hasn't already been set.

We could make it say something like "It's not really helpful to throw that around."

[pahp]

@Saturn-99 is going to look at messages.h and make some changes / tweaks before next week's alpha test.