Actors are Actors

Admittedly, both Sharpee and Chord are still very young and cranky. I continually find seams in both through working with Chord. In my latest set of activities, I started to port my old Textfyre game, Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter, to Chord. I'd talked to Mike Gentry earlier in the year about making a new version with specific changes and he loved all of it. Sadly, he's moved on from IF and was not interested in helping. I'll eventually have a separate post about these changes, but I'll summarize by saying I'm opening the world up and removing the rails (those were intentional for the target audience) and changing the main character in a very important and present-day meaningful way. I am using Claude to port the code, but all content changes are mine, including puzzles/logic/text.

A problem surfaced from complaints I had about event capturing in actor/npc blocks in Chord. There was a lot of what I call inelegant phrasing to the syntax. That led to digging into the differences between the player character and NPCs in Sharpee and Chord and this seam was telling me that NPCs needed to be dissolved into the platform and Actor was a singular architecture concept.

This is the offending language that started everything...

after entering it, while the stall is blocked
  phrase keeper-yells
  move the player to an adjacent room, randomly
end after

I was bothered that a) the target actor is not identified here, and b) 'it' is ceremonial and not really necessary. Pushing on those two seams followed this progression:

create the sword
  on taking it
    refuse sword-not-for-you
  end on

create the sword
  on the player taking
    refuse sword-not-for-you
  end on

In the below example, we explicitly say who the event capture is targeting...in this case the Actor currently designated as the player.

create the Grocery Stall
  a room
  states: open, blocked

  after the player entering, while the Grocery Stall is blocked
    phrase keeper-yells
    move the player to a random adjacent room
  end after

The only exception is an actors own block:

create Jack
  a person
  playable
  starts in the Northwest Junction

  on going while the wandering mercenaries is aggressive
    refuse merc-held
  end on

In this case, there is only one target actor so explicitly naming the actor would be redundant.

And for 'it' and 'its', they survive in one place: Trait definitions...

define trait kick-escape
  on the player kicking
    refuse when it is oblivious: merc-dont-provoke
    phrase merc-break-free-kick when it is aggressive
    change it to approaching
    reset its lunge
    start its recovery
  end on
end trait

This also led to the player being a role that can be changed.

Before...

create the player
  starts in the Northwest Junction
  kick-yourself
  wears the old gray cloak
  wears the woolen cap
  wears the boots
  carries the cloth satchel

  Jack Toresal, who has been a boy in this market for as long as anyone here has
  bothered to look.

  on going while the wandering mercenaries is aggressive
    refuse merc-held
  end on

  after going while hunted
    restart waiting
  end after

And now that will be...

create Jack
  a person
  playable
  starts in the Northwest Junction

  Jack Toresal, who has been a boy in this market for as long as anyone here has
  bothered to look.

  on going while the wandering mercenaries is aggressive
    refuse merc-held
  end on

With the new block...

before the game starts
  change the player to Jack
end before

Which allows us to change the player character when we choose...

create Viola
  a person
  playable
  starts in the Chapel

  Viola.

create the Chapel
  a room

  A chapel.

  after Jack examining the seal
    phrase cut-to-viola
    change the player to Viola
  end after

And now all actors in chord are the same and one is the player character at any designed time. All of their actions thread through the platform exactly as the player character does today. (and no, this was not the case for the current npc-plugin architecture).

This is a very big change to Sharpee and Chord, so needs full regressions with both and the platform and chord sample stories.