Hello, hello. I’ve noticed a bunch of recent games, like Zozzled, Vampire Ltd. and Rope of Chalk, which all use a similar menu-based conversation system where conversations are conducted via a menu and you pick a response with a number. These are all Inform 7 games, so I figured that it was likely that there was a common extension to do this, but after searching around, I couldn’t find one.
Well, let me amend that - I couldn’t find one that was hosted and maintained by the author.
Zozzled and Rope of Chalk appear to be closed-source, but the author of Vampire Ltd. helpfully included the source code in the submission, which leads to a thread (Michael Martin's Quip Based Conversations - #2 by matt_weiner) where somebody has edited and re-uploaded Michael Martin’s Quip-Based Conversation and Reactable Quips. I gather the original, and possibly Michael himself, has dropped off the internet at some point. This other thread (Menu-based conversation extension? - #2 by tayruh) recommends a different but also no longer supported extension, Hybrid Choices. Neither of these are currently being distributed by their authors and neither of them are in the extension library.
Also I saw in the documentation for Threaded Conversation that you might be able to paste a menu on top of it, but then on the discussion thread (Threaded Conversation by Chris Conley - #6 by Ruber_Eaglenest) somebody asks how to do it and the answer is basically write a custom integration, at which point I might just try rolling my own.
So, couple of questions. First, how can I tell how these extensions are licensed, if at all? I note that all currently available extensions via the license library are said to be under CC 4.0, but the individual .i7x files don’t for Michael Martin’s don’t have any licensing terms, which in a practical sense probably is under “nobody cares and Michael Martin’s almost certainly not gonna break down your door 'cuz you used an extension he wrote once and then dropped” but, still.
Second, do people usually use an extension for menu-based conversation (either of the above, passed down through the grapevine, or one I missed), or is it common to roll your own? If so are there any examples that I could follow? Especially, does anybody have an example of pasting a menu on top of Threaded Conversation, because that seems cool and it not being a random download off the forums appeals to me. Though I’m definitely not above using random downloads off the forums if that’s just How Things Be Done.