Chapter: DISAMBIGUATION AND PRIMARY SUBJECTS

Since quizzing about and informing about are actions that potentially apply to all objects defined in our game, there is a danger that trying to converse with someone about something may result in an ungainly disambiguation prompt:

>ASK JIM ABOUT BALL

Which do you mean, the red rubber ball, the ball gown, the masked ball or the ball bearing?

Conversation Rules takes care of this to some extent by preferring subjects that are known about to those that aren't in such contexts, which may help cut down the list (and avoid revealing the existence of something the player isn't meant to know about yet), but this may not be enough to avoid all instances of ungainly disambiguation, especially in the later stages of a game when most things are known about. Conversation Rules offers partial relief in the form of the primary/secondary condition applied to all objects. Other things being equal, Conversation Rules will pick a primary thing in preference to a secondary thing in a context such as this (provided the primary thing is known). So, for example, if we want all conversational references to BALL, not otherwise qualified, to refer to the masked ball, then we could define:

    The masked ball is a primary subject.

The problem is, the masked ball is then the primary meaning of 'ball' for all interlocutors in the game. If little Billy is more likely to be more interested in his red rubber ball, we should have to supply special grammar lines for this particular exception:

    Understand "ask [billy] about [red subber ball]" as quizzing it about.
    Understand "a [red rubber ball]" as quizzing it about when the default interlocutor is Billy.

But it could become quite cumbersome to do this for a lot of subject/interlocutor combinations.


Chapter:. OTHER FEATURES

Note that Conversation Rules is fully compatible with the greeting protocols defined in Conversation Framework (for which consult the Conversation Framework documentation). To take full advantage of this it may be necessary to write rules for saying hello and goodbye to particular NPCs in addition to the various types of conversation rule described above.

Conversation Rules is also compatible with the abbreviated conversation commands A THIS or T THAT implemented in Conversation Framework.