I’ve completed the first versions of my new Glulx-only menu system extensions. (EDIT: They’re no longer glulx only… read through the topic to find the news about where I made them Z-Code compatible, too.) The documentation is thorough and all included examples have been tested.
First up is Glulx Menus:
“Lets you include a menu system of help, hints and/or other information in your game. This is a Glulx only upgrade of Emily Short’s Menus extension featuring user friendly single keypress controls and a more sophisticated UI. It also has configurable options, a book mode with automatic pagination and isolated message content to make translation to other languages easy. Original Menus format tables can be upgraded for use with Glulx Menus with a little work.”
Try the example in the extension to see the majority of its features in action.
To go with Glulx Menus, I’ve got a compatible edition of Emily Short’s Basic Help Menu extension called Glulx Basic Help Menu:
“Provides a HELP command which brings up a menu giving standard instructions about IF. This is an update of Emily Short’s Basic Help Menu extension to make it compatible with Glulx Help Menus.”
Development of these extensions was discussed previously another thread on this board (https://intfiction.org/t/my-wip-menus-extension/5193/1). All suggestions were taken into consideration and nearly all were implemented.
As I say, these have been tested a fair bit, but going public brings a new level of scrutiny. I will leave these here for a couple of weeks at least. I invite further feedback on the examples and features and such, in this thread, and I’ll see if anyone turns up any problems. After that, the extensions can graduate to the extensions website, aka Bovine University.
… Hm, if I make a some slightly more squished versions of the instructional messages for Z-code projects, I can get this to support Z-code as well. I solved a few other z-code issues. So I think I should try to do that. The only pain then is I can’t use the great name ‘Glulx Menus’. What should I call it? Touchy Menus? Sparkle Menus? Menu Power? It’s Raining Menu?
I’m sorry I haven’t given this enough time yet, but I’d still like to see if it would be a suitable replacement for the built in Menus extension. In which case Menus would be a good name!
I’ve now made these extensions compatible with both Glulx and Z-Code. The names have also become just ‘Menus’ and ‘Basic Help Menu’ respectively as a result.
These latest versions have replaced the previous ones in the same link location, for anyone who wants to try them:
And a belated thank you to mostly useless for the encouragement.
The 2 week mark of these extensions hanging around is approaching, at which point I had originally planned to graduate them to the extensions site. But now that a new Inform is imminent, I’ll hold off and get them compatible with it, when it arrives, before continuing this thrilling test cycle.
I thought new Inform was imminent-ish, but since two months have passed since I thought that, I’ve changed my mind and decided I have no idea when it’s coming. As such I’m going to submit these extensions to the extension library real soon.
I’d like to encourage anyone to try them and use them in new or in-development projects, because I think they’re neat, and they produce menu systems that are considerably more accessible and handier than have been available in the past. Also, transcript clutter is reduced by 95%! You’ve gotta admit, that’s a lot of reduction.