I7 extension: Interactive Poetic Interludes

I’ve adapted Michael Bacon’s Interactive Poetry extension for the creation of short “interludes” of keyword-based poetry or narrative within interactive fiction created with Inform 7.

You can now find the extension on the Inform 7 extensions page.

Peace,
Kazuki Mishima

Cool idea. I just tried out the example, and it works pretty seamlessly. I suspect that the number of IF’s for which this will be really useful is small, but maybe it will spark some ideas.

One thought: It would be cool if there were support for:

(1) Keyword highlighting a la Blue Lacuna;
(2) on Glulx, hyperlinked keywords as an added interface simplifier.

I don’t think the latter would be very hard, at least, but I haven’t looked at the organization very closely.

In any case, I’m not suggesting that this extension (or the original) in any way needs these enhancements–just that they’d be neat!

Good stuff.
Erik

Glad you like the extension. I made it for a work-in-progress, and I thought of keeping it to myself.

I don’t think I have the coding prowess or the inclination to make those enhancements myself at present, but they do sound like good ideas. If anyone wants to take a stab at coding them, be my guest. :smiley:

Peace,
Kazuki Mishima

Very nice, Kazuki. I like how you used a scene for this. Good idea. To answer your question in the docs regarding keeping time from running, add “out of world” like this:

Topic-choosing is an action out of world applying to one topic.

Mind, this will take a little re-arranging. The poem display rule should then probably be a Report rule, and we should explicitly call the scene-changing rules so that can happen. Every turn rules won’t run while out-of-world. This is probably a good thing as the author is using Every Turn rules for stuff that would interfere.

Report topic-choosing (this is the poem display rule): [ Etc. ]; consider the scene-changing rules.

Finally, since Before, Instead, and After rules don’t run while out-of-world, you’d be able to remove this line: Instead of doing something other than topic-choosing when Poetic Interlude is happening: try topic-choosing the player's command.

(I haven’t actually tested this, so you may need to nudge it here & there.)

Thanks a bunch for the advice, Mr. Newcomb. I’ll try reworking the extension a bit.

I’ve fixed that turn counter problem and updated the link in my first post for version 2 of the extension.