In my quest to keep Inform6 up to date and usable for those who like it, I’ve made a sort of follow-on of Danni’s Friends of I7 at Github. Mine is, quite appropriately github.com/i6. Right now all I have is an extensions group. I’ll be adding extensions that I’ve gone through and vetted as being usable with the latest releases of Inform6. I’m not sure yet how I’ll organize it. I’d like to try putting all the extensions into the same directory so that an author can see at once what is available.
I approve!
That’s a great idea! Thank you!
Sorry, I’m not very familiar with Github’s social features; how does that work exactly? If I have an account, i ask you to add me to the group, is that correct? And then is there a place to chat there about the extensions and others, or are we chatting here?
I was thinking the other day I needed to do a webpage to centralize every I6 extension and see which one is better for a variety of categories (NPCs, time, advanced parsing, newbie help, etc), so instead I’ll contribute to that 
There are a few French extensions that could be useful, and I think I saw some good ones on the Spanish forum. I’ll look in a few days and let you know.
Hi again,
I had a look at what I6 extensions we had on the French-speaking forum, but we don’t have a lot 
You can find some here - most notably, we have a translation of “moveclass.h”, along with other ones (smartcantgo, npc-engine, dirsmap, for instance - I don’t know the other ones, but those ones are useful).
As for “original work”, we have “scenic5sens” (“scenic with all 5 senses”), based on Roger Firth and Stefano Gaburri’s scenic.h, which allows the author to conveniently handle scenic objects that are unimportant to the game but that are typically mentioned in the description ; this one goes further by allowing to specify responses to Smell, Touch, Listen, Taste, Examine, or any other action.
Finally, there are two extensions I did recently : EffetsDeTexte (text effects, which packs every text effect I could think of - typewriter, colors, bold, after waiting a while, etc) and PhraseNames (like Neil Cerutti’s pname.h, for smarter parsing, but with more logic embedded in it and less replacing routines from the library). See my BitBucket, and let me know if they seem interesting.
I also looked at extensions from the Spanish forum: there’s ExpertGrammar, Wearable, and another one for conversations; not sure if that’s all or if there are some more elsewhere.
Would a comparison of extensions and their functionalities according to their ‘field’ be a good idea for this project? I.e. something that says “if you are looking for extensions for NPCs, the best ones are XXX and YYY; ZZZ has less functionalities”.
I’m all for supporting I6. (I wrote an extension myself, in 2010.) My question is, what will the github page have that isn’t already on the if-archive?
Aside from being easier to find, I suppose. Finding I6 anything on the archive is a bit twisty. (Extensions are at ifarchive.org/indexes/if-arc … tions.html, in case anyone is wondering.)
I think chatting about extensions should be done here. Writing and bugsquashing should be done on Github. One problem with the extensions on the IF-Archive is that there’s a lot of bitrot in there. Another is that many extensions don’t have a stated distribution license. That one got Inform6 kicked out of the Debian repos. This Friends of I6 project idea grew out of the desire to gather some vetted and known-redistributable extensions for the Inform6 unix package.
If anyone would like write access, please let me know your Github username and I’ll send an invite.
I’m not planning to get very involved in your project, but the business about distribution licensing makes sense to me. If you’ll tell us what license is needed, I’ll add it to EventList.h and email the revised code to you so you can add it to your aggregation.
The I7 extension library has standardized on Creative Common Attribution (CC-BY). This would make sense for I6 extensions as well, if we’re going to do them in a bunch.
Creative Commons recommends against using their licenses for software:
wiki.creativecommons.org/Freque … oftware.3F
It’s not the plan I usually use, but in this case I lean towards consistency.
The other good option would be Artistic to match the I6 standard library.
When the license issue came up, I went ahead and sought out the authors of extensions asking for them to put them in Artistic 2. I based that on Graham’s decision to do that for Inform7. Some went for GPL (which seems awkward for IF) or public domain.