Extension Requests and General Discussion

[size=200]Extension Requests and General Discussion[/size]

This is a semi-officially-recognized but highly informal place to discuss the state of I7 extensions in general, and to post rambling statements desiring vaguely-defined extensions meeting your exacting - though nebulous - specifications repeatedly until you give up and write your own extension, cribbing heavily off of Conversation Framework by Eric Eve and muttering darkly[size=85]*[/size] to yourself.

And, preferably, a few useful and concise suggestions about possible extension needs that will spark aspiring I7 authors to contribute a lasting gem to the community.

[size=50]*Please don’t do too much of the muttering-darkly path. It drives our insurance rates up.[/size]

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Is there some sort of restriction on posting topics in the Technical Development board? I’m not seeing the “New Topic” button that I see elsewhere.

I ask because I genuinely have a useful and concise suggestion.

I imagine there’s a script that creates a thread automatically for each extension uploaded to the I7 site.

Actually we’re just making them manually!

Yeah this board will be reply only. You canmake requests in this topic, or in the Inform board.

Oh. Well here’s my request: I would like an extension that makes a segmented substitutions for different kinds of casing. So you could write “[upper case]some stuff[end casing]” and the stuff would get printed in upper case. Or, and this is the one I really want, you could write “[capitalize]some stuff[end casing]” and the first letter of the stuff would get capitalized.

This may seem trivial, but I have just been writing something where I’d like to put a couple of lists at the beginnings of sentences and OY GEVALT. One list came from Emily Short’s Complex Listing extension and I had to write about seven different phrases to be able to tell the phrase that actually prints the text that I wanted to start with a capital letter. The other seemed like it should be a simple “[A list of things that…]”, but the list started with a number, and the “[A list of]” call doesn’t capitalize numbers.

This seems like it would either be pretty simple to do or very complex. The interaction with Complex Listing in particular seems like it might be kind of hairy; since the phrase in Complex Listing that does the work (“dump list”) directly says stuff instead of generating a text/indexed text, perhaps the only way to do this is to use Text Capture to buffer the text inside the substitution, apply the casing to that, and then spit it out? Oy gevalt, again. But without something like this Inform will be pretty intolerant of different ways of constructing sentences.

In general, I wish the list writer weren’t so inaccessible to Inform 7, though its behavior is clearly quite involved so I can see why it’s something of a black box. Also, since there isn’t a thread for Complex Listing, it would be good if it could be made to play nicely with numbers (it produces output like “You can see here a pencil, a paper, an eraser, a clipboard, a desk, a desk, a desk, and a desk”) but that would be hard to do.

EDIT: OK, so that wasn’t exactly concise.

Requests for extensions can go on the general Inform forum, since you’re really asking “how do I do this”. (Any programming question can turn into “there should be an extension to do this”, but that doesn’t mean they should all go in this thread.)

The answer to your question is, unfortunately, that this is very complex. It is Text Capture territory from the get-go.

Does the forum software not support sub-sections? Just seems a bit odd why it’s under “Technical Development” and not “Inform 6 and 7 Development”.

It does, but we decided to put it here. I can’t remember why anymore.

So is there an official policy about what this thread is for? I’d thought my extension request was in line with vimes’s and Dannii’s posts, and I put it here because it involves segmented substitutions which in turn seems to involve I6 which in turn means I’m really asking “how can someone else do this” rather than “how can I do this,” but I can take it to Inform 7 development if necessary.

I wonder if this would be right for this board.

“Flexible Windows” seems to be a very useful, oft-used extension with a very spotty history, several versions, tracked and untracked bugs, and it’s a bit of a mess. I’d welcome a thread here that could make sense of it all.

As the maintainer of Flexible Windows I can say that I’m working on it! Hopefully it will be ready for the Public Library soon. I’m not aware of any unfixed bugs… if you are can you point me to them/put them on Github?

I’m not actively following it, just tried to use it a couple of times and hit a few snags, and then discovered that getting information on FW - or even finding the latest version - was anything but straightforward. I was under the impression there were still things left to be sorted out - but if you say you’re not aware of unfixed bugs, then there probably aren’t any. :slight_smile:

Glad to hear it’s being actively worked on. It seems to be one of the most oft-used extensions. It’s certainly one of the single most useful and flexible for anyone wanting to stray from the vanilla presentation of standard IF.

(Actually now that I think about it more, I’m tempted to rewrite it from scratch. The code is such a mess now. Anyway, when it’s ready you’ll see it here first!)

Also, a general warning (based on my own experience): The built-in extensions for Inform have all been updated and should work, but if they are kicking up errors, it is possible that you have your own copy of these extensions installed which is overriding the built-in. A look at the Extensions / Public Library tag should tell you the status of your extensions relative to the latest version, and may help catch errors that are coming about for that reason.

Ooooh, I’ve had umpteen errors like that. :frowning: I wish Inform could, in case of duplicates like that, choose the extension with the highest version number.

Just a note to authors, you are encouraged to edit the topics for your extensions here. If you see an extension that belongs to you but the topic is by vimes, let us know and we’ll make you the author.

Dropped by to say I’ve just tagged the last commit I did to the Inform 7 extensions archive with “6G60.”

It means the extensions at that point should be working with release 6G60 of Inform 7.

If I did this wrong, or if you have questions and/or comments, let me know so I can take a look. Thanks.

I’m not sure what’s going to happen with the old extensions site now that the Public Library site has been started. Emily or vines, do you know?

I guess we should add the files from the Public Library to the archive too.

Where is that “Public Library” site? Is it already set up?

We think the correct answer has to involve the old extensions site still existing (especially since the Windows build doesn’t access the Public Library) and offering both old and new extensions in some way, since some people won’t have moved on from the last build, because they’re working on older projects. The exact details are still in progress, but it’s being worked on.