Updated I7 Handbook

What is it you’d like out of Consolidated Multiple Actions? Having taken a look at it and gone “Guh,” I’ve thought of trying to rewrite it from scratch–probably basing it on Text Capture rather than Hypothetical Questions. (Is Hypothetical Questions updated for 6L32? That seems like it’d be a bear to update.) That is, my idea is that you run all the actions in sequence the way they would, but if an action is a candidate for consolidation you hold the text that would printed while it runs. Then at the end you have rules for spitting out some of that text as you captured it and consolidating other parts of it. Does this sound like this would reproduce the functionality you want, if I could pull it off? (Note: I would not have time to do this for a while.)

As far as updating I6 inclusions go, from my one successful attempt updating an I6-heavy extension sometimes the I6 inclusions are just a big chunk of the I6 templates with a couple of lines changed. So sometimes you can do this by looking at the old version of the templates that the extension is modifying, seeing how the I6 inclusions modify it, going to the new version of the templates, and trying to put the modifications into the new version. Sometimes this is easier than other times.

Anyway, updating stuff that dives into the I6 is definitely the hard part. As zarf says the parser is difficult to deal with; it definitely requires updating every so often, but the way it is it seems as though updates to the parser are inevitably going to break things. I tend to agree that Inform 7 should have been designed in such a way as to ensure backward compatibility but that would require a time machine. :-/ (And there are some things that probably break compatibility that I’m glad to have lost–the library message system was terrible and I’m glad to have the response system instead.)