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# How to get rid of a rule that's blocking what I want the player to do? (Inform 7)

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asked Jul 19 in Authoring by EatenByAGrue (75 points)

I'm trying to find a way to either get around or get rid of the rule preventing a player from talking to inanimate objects. Here's how I put in the 'talking' action:

Understand the command "talk" as something new. Understand "talk to [someone]" as talking. Talking is an action applying to one thing. Carry out talking: say "You chat back and forth a bit."

And in the game there's an object you can talk to:

Instead of talking the sample object:
display the Figure of Object1;
switch to CYOA at HiObject.

But this code doesn't work in the game; instead, I get the message about inanimate objects. Changing the 'instead of' to 'before' doesn't work either. As a last resort, I tried getting rid of the entire rule, but

The can't talk to inanimate things rule is not listed in any rulebook.

gives me this error:

In 'The can't talk to inanimate things rule is not listed in any rulebook' , you gave 'The can't talk to inanimate things rule' where a rule was required.

Can anyone help? I know there's an extension for talking to inanimate objects, but I'd rather not add in another extension just for one little thing.

- inform7

## 1 Answer

+2 votes
answered Jul 19 by Daniel Stelzer

Change [someone] to [something] in your Understand line. The parser right now is only looking for a person, since the [someone] token only matches animates. [Something] matches both people and objects.

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