[Chris Crawford]

I just uploaded a small change to the BareBones storyworld. For subtle reasons, it was making an error in the presentation of the Protagonist's initial location. In other words, on the very first event of every storyworld, it would tell the player that his location was "Nowhere". You can fix your own storyworld, if you wish, but altering the System verb "Once upon a time" by adding the WordSocket "3Actor" in the Properties dialog box. Warning: you should NEVER change a system verb unless *I* tell you to do so! Playing with System verbs is a shortcut to disaster, because the Engine makes lots of assumptions about the System verbs being a certain way. Change that and the Engine goes nuts.

[Chris Conley]

Chris Crawford, on 22 June 2010 - 11:29 AM, said:

I just uploaded a small change to the BareBones storyworld. For subtle reasons, it was making an error in the presentation of the Protagonist's initial location. In other words, on the very first event of every storyworld, it would tell the player that his location was "Nowhere". You can fix your own storyworld, if you wish, but altering the System verb "Once upon a time" by adding the WordSocket "3Actor" in the Properties dialog box. Warning: you should NEVER change a system verb unless *I* tell you to do so! Playing with System verbs is a shortcut to disaster, because the Engine makes lots of assumptions about the System verbs being a certain way. Change that and the Engine goes nuts.

Slightly off-topic: why are these verbs open to editing in Storytron, anyway? Why not make their sockets and scripts read-only? It seems like an invitation to disaster.

[Chris Crawford]

Yes, you're quite right about the editability of the System Verbs being a problem. We gave it some thought but there was no simple, clean way to make them uneditable in some ways, yet editable in the few ways that we want them to be editable. The problem really calls for a system in which the System Verbs don't ever need to be edited -- but that's a trickier problem.