In “Creative Writing With Inform 7”, Aaron Reed covers the Threaded Conversation extension by Emily Short (pp. 284-288). Maybe I’m missing something obvious, but there seems to be no place to download it. Does anybody know where (or how) to get hold of it?
Thanks,
Christian
He does also say somewhere (I think?) that as of the book’s writing, it’s not public. It’s still being worked on, but existed in enough of a draft form for me to be able to share with him the draft version.
There’s a (now getting outdated but still right in essentials) discussion here:
He does indeed, right in the first paragraph. So much for the “Read Better, Read Faster” course I took years ago.
Thanks, Emily!
Christian
Apologies to Emily for putting her in the somewhat awkward position of having the book come out before the extension!
If it’s any consolation to those waiting, it’s going to be awesome when it’s released.
(And I expect, from Emily’s perspective, it’s going to be released when it’s awesome.)
Has anything happened with this extension? I just ran into this problem as well – and I realize I’m REALLY late to the game. I’ve also noticed you can’t compile Alabaster without this extension.
When last I talked about this, my goals before releasing Threaded Conversation were as follow:
a) complete at least one more full game using the extension in a different context, to prove its viability for a multi-NPC work. (This is mostly done – enough that I feel okay about it as a proof-of-concept exercise for the extension, though the game itself hasn’t come out.)
b) overhaul the documentation, which was written for an earlier stage of the project and hasn’t been kept completely up to date
c) repair some dependencies on old material – the conversation builder used in Alabaster relied on a string extension by Jesse McGrew that is itself now deprecated and that I had hacked, but it shouldn’t really be depending on that
d) tidy up the way Threaded Conversation handles greetings so that it would dovetail neatly with some of Eric Eve’s stuff
e) additional beta testing and bugfixing as needed, with a core of invited volunteers
f) (maybe) create some more visualization tools to help authors build the kinds of charts I made for Alabaster, but ideally without having to do the quirky hackery that I did myself
Buuut about two years ago I changed careers to be working in the game industry, and since then I’ve had a pretty dense schedule where I was working 60-hour weeks and by the time I arrived at any leisure time had burned out the coding part of my brain.
In that time, several people have asked me for the Threaded Conversation package, and I’ve mailed them what I had with the appropriate caveats. And one of those people has now done © himself, so that the version I currently have no longer has the string extension dependency and is compilable with the current version of Inform.
I am open to handing off what I have to someone who wants to help do the finishing work on it so that we can release something to the community, and I’ve actually started that process with a couple of volunteers, only to have it fall through in each case because of other people being as busy as I am.
But I’m still open to that solution, if someone out there does have the time and inclination to go over the material and help double-check the documentation, test functionality, etc.
However, in its current state, I feel like it is too problematic – misdocumented, potentially erroneous, etc. – to put into the hands of the newbies who might download it straight after reading Aaron’s Inform 7 book.
…and I have another volunteer, so we’re going to take another crack at this.
Looks like you’ve got a good chance of beating me to the punch for the next new conversation extension. At this point I don’t plan to release Speech Motivations until after my WIP is finished, which most likely won’t be before this year’s IFComp.