Thanks for the comments, everyone.
@Jim: Check out the Player Experience documentation-- most of the features you ask for are already included. Punctuation Removal is included with Inform, but not activated, so I suppose you’re right-- I don’t need to actually duplicate it within the extension, just add a line including it.
On the italics: I have mixed feelings about this, too. It does tend to draw more attention to the parser than normal. But on the other hand I like that it makes it more clear what text is from the author and what text is from the engine. I’m up in the air about what this should look like by default. But for now it’s easy to set this to whatever you want (towards the top of the documentation).
@whoiscraig: I hope to eventually make NLM compatible with CLM-- it’s more work than it might at first appear, so I’ve left that out for now. I’m interested to see how many people are using CLM these days to change the person/tense of their game?
@Victor: Nearly all of those come from Emily Short’s old I6 NewbieGrammar, and were apparently taken from real verbs people tried in an online Zork. I am extremely sympathetic to the idea of removing superfluous verbs from the library altogether, but if they’re there they might as well respond to the words people are using to try to do them.
@severedhand: Thanks for these detailed thoughts. My general feeling is that if the library is already a giant mass of special cases functionality (the Standard Rules have what, over 500 individual rules?) adding about fifty more to significantly improve the player’s experience is a worthwhile trade-off, especially if they’re well-labelled enough to always identify exactly where they’re coming from with the RULES command (which isn’t always true for the Standard Rules)-- althoughI’m aware the non-rules based stuff like new grammar lines isn’t as easy to track down. These have already been extensively tested and my goal is to make them as well-tested and reliable as anything that comes with the standard library.
The concern that something here will interfere with your own code is definitely legit. But as far as “needing and wanting the functionality,” I feel like to a certain extent this is the wrong way to think about this extension. It really provides no new functionality at all for authors— it just gives players more ways to express the same things to interact with your story.
A lot of my impetus to form this compilation package was a recent experience where a friend wrote a new IF for a graduate art class here, and the class critiqued it. I would estimate more than half the time was spent talking about minor interface difficulties-- “I couldn’t tell what direction to go in, I kept typing GO OUT from this one room and it didn’t work, I tried some things like WHERE AM I and it never understood my commands.” It was frustrating because most of these problems have been fixed by various extensions over the years, except those extensions are not being used by new authors. If my friend added the one line to include Player Experience Upgrade (not that it existed yet at the time), more of the class could have experienced his story, and we could have spent the whole class (or at least more of it) talking about the content of my friend’s piece, not the interface.