I'm sure you'll get fed up with me sooner or later!

I am designing a room in which bats (rather improbably) carry away the player.

When I just had the message but hadn't implemented the carrying-away, my code worked fine.

define room <Long Corridor>
	east <East End of Corridor>
	west <Top of Stairs>
	script if here <bats> then msg <A hoard of bats swoops down upon you, picks you up and deposits you outside the factory.>
	description <You are in a long corridor which stretches further to the east.|nTo the west is the top of the stairs.>

	define object <bats>
		prefix <the>
		article <them>
		gender <they>
		type <TLTcontainer>
	end define

end define

This yielded the output

> east
You are in a long corridor which stretches further to the east.
To the west is the top of the stairs.
A hoard of bats swoops down upon you, picks you up and deposits you outside the factory.

Now I'm trying to implement the abduction so I added a script:

define room <Long Corridor>
	east <East End of Corridor>
	west <Top of Stairs>
	script {
		if not flag <bats_flown> then {
			msg <A hoard of bats swoops down upon you, picks you up and deposits you outside the factory.>
			goto <Outside the Tower>
		}
		else msg <You are in a long corridor which stretches further to the east.|nTo the west is the top of the stairs.>
	}

and the resultant output is

> east
You are in Long Corridor.


You can see the bats here.

You can move east or west.
A hoard of bats swoops down upon you, picks you up and deposits you outside the factory.
You are standing in the street outside a large, and rather ancient, run-down factory. The factory door is to the north.

The first three lines are not wanted but I can't find a way to suppress them. This is particularly annoying as all my output is supposed to be plain text but these lines have the default colours and boldening.

I've probably been told how to deal with this before but I can't work it out.

Frank

You first code sample has a "description" tag which would suppress the default description. However, your second sample doesn't have this, which is why Quest is printing its default description for the room.

If you don't want a description at all, try one of the following:

description
description <>
description {}
description msg <|xn>

Some or all of those should work (well they all should work, but I can't test right now whether the top two will produce an annoying extra new-line).

Alex said:

If you don't want a description at all, try one of the following:

Just for the sheer hell of it I tried all the suggestions.
The first one has no effect.
The second works as long as you put a space between the <and>
All the other had the desired effect.

So thank you, Alex, for such a simple but effective solution!