AnythingTokenCheck (new to Roodylib 3.9)

One of the things I was most excited to take a swing at in Robb Sherwin's CZK was a certain gun.  I had noticed when betatesting the game that >UNLOAD GUN dropped the ammo to the location.  This was the impetus for me to code my "new empty" system for Roodylib, which uses grammar sorcery and object classes to support objects with different emptying behavior- held items that empty to the ground, held items that empty to the player, unheld items that empty to the ground, etc.

So I was really happy to apply this code to CZK and see how it worked.  Unfortunately, it didn't work great!  See, my "grammar helper" stuff uses the "anything" grammar token, so any object is fair game.  Since CZK has several guns, >EMPTY GUN got a "Which gun do you mean, this gun or that gun or... ?"

Nothing else could be done about this at the grammar level so I had to look other places.  Luckily, FindObject determines what objects are available at any point, so it just took some digging and examination to find a good place to test against an AnythingTokenCheck routine.

            if not AnythingTokenCheck(obj)
            {
#ifset DEBUG
                if debug_flags & D_FINDOBJECT
                {
                    print "[FindObject("; obj.name; " ["; number obj; "], "; \
                    objloc.name; " ["; number objloc; "]):  "; \
                    "false (AnythingTokenCheck returned false)]"
                }
#endif
                return false
            }

Now let's look at the AnythingTokenCheck routine:

I check for a parent of obj just so we can dismiss any objects not currently in any room or container straight away, and then it can check against the location.  This way, >EMPTY will only be used against objects within scope.

Now, it doesn't seem like people generally use the anything grammar token for much other than ASK/TELL, but I still think AnythingTokenCheck will be useful whenever people do use them for other means, and now it's there to be replaced when people need it.

>EXAMINE HACKER'S KEYRING

One of the things I've wanted for Hugo was an automated way to support possessive adjectives when referring to characters' belongings.  Since Hugo doesn't really give you complete control over the grammar, this is pretty hard to do.  Recently, I coded the best solution I could come up with.  Basically, it's a wrapper routine for Acquire that sets or clears adjectives as needed.  The downside is, you'd have to add an extra empty element to any object that might be used with it, like this:

       

object potato "potato"
{
 article "a"
 adjective "hot" 0
 noun "potato"
 in you
}

       
 

Now, I couldn't really decide on an intuitive name for the routine, but since I figured it was for games where objects are passed around between characters a lot, I opted for the name "HotPotato":

       

attribute keep_adjectives
routine HotPotato(obj,new_parent)
{
 local a
 a = parent(obj)
 if a is living and obj is not keep_adjectives
 {
  if CharacterKey(a)
   obj.adjective #(obj.#adjectives) = 0
 }
 if not new_parent
  remove obj
 else
 {
  a = CharacterKey(new_parent)
  if Acquire(new_parent, obj) and obj is not keep_adjectives
  {
   if a
    obj.adjective #(obj.#adjectives) = a
  }
 
}
       
 

If not provided with a "new_parent" object, HotPotato just removes the object after clearing any applicable adjectives.  Any game that uses this would have to provide its own CharacterKey routine, which would look like this:

       
routine CharacterKey(char)
{
 local a
 select char
  case fred: a = "fred's"
  case player: a = "my"
 return a
}
       
 

Now, all of this work is kind of useless since among games with characters, there usually isn't so much object-swapping that most of this couldn't be done by hand.  Plus, you'll notice that HotPotato only checks for one layer of containment in characters and there might be games where you'd want to check for grandchildren (or further).  Still, this is as close to automating this in Hugo as it's going to get, I think.

There's also the issue of words like "your","my","his", and "her" (>ASK FRED ABOUT HIS HAT).  I find the best solution is to just define these words as removals so the parser completely ignores them.

       
removal "his","her"
removal "my","your"
       
 

How many of these you define as removals depends on your game (games like Spur use "your" as a permanent adjective for certain things).  Also, because of games like Spur where some objects keep a certain ownership despite who is carrying them (like, "your gun" compared to "O'Grady's gun"), I added that keep_adjectives attribute to give objects that should be left alone.