Consolidated Multiple Actions -- Any News?

Authoring Inform 7
1

Version 2 of the Handbook mentions a handy extension called Consolidated Multiple Actions by John Clemens. Apparently it hasn’t been updated for Inform 10, and that’s a shame. Does anybody have a suggestion how to duplicate its functionality, or a new extension that does something similar?

The idea is, if the player is carrying multiple indistinguishable objects, the parser handles them one by one, like this:

>drop silver dollars
silver dollar: Dropped.
silver dollar: Dropped.
silver dollar: Dropped.
silver dollar: Dropped.

What we would like would be this:

>drop silver dollars
You drop four silver dollars.

Is there a way to get that result in Inform today?

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2

Looking over Consolidated Multiple Actions, I don’t see an obvious reason it couldn’t be updated for 10.1. But there’s no prepared solution I know of.

For a bunch of extensions that never made it past the 6G60-6L02 barrier event there’s no compelling reason they couldn’t, it’s just that no one ever did the updating and not many people are thinking about now decade-old extensions. I updated Clemens’ Scheduled Activities by changing two lines using the old change X to Y syntax; there are probably others it would be trivial to rehabilitate.

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You could be right about Consolidated, but there’s a lot of I6 inclusion code in there, and editing that is above my pay grade. (My first game was written in I6, but that was close to 25 years ago.)

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Well, I tried. I changed “style” to “stile” and “GENERATE” to “GINERATE” in order to avoid namespace conflicts, and also “instead of” to “replacing”. I got up to the point where “Translating the Source - Failed.”

Foo.

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5

Sorry, I was waxing on the subject of 6G60 extensions in general. Consolidated Multiple Actions itself would not be trivial to update.

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6

Actions on Groups might be applicable. Haven’t played with it myself.

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7

It’s a clever extension, but you have to manually recode every action that you might want to apply to a group of things – exmining, dropping, putting on, inserting into, etc. In certain situations this could be useful, I’m sure, but it’s not a general solution.

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I’ve taken a whack at updating Consolidated Multiple Actions for 10.1. Depends on updated Hypothetical Questions by Jesse McGrew for 10.1. Unless I or someone find a problem with them, I’ll clean 'em up and push them to the Friends repo.

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Why doesn’t github have a download button? That seems such an obvious thing to have on the page. I’ve looked and looked and looked, and I can’t find it.

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I feel like it used to. They might have removed it.

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I also think they did.

The “raw” button above the file text display gives you a file that you can just save straight from the browser (or feed the link into curl or wget).

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The new beta view does offer a download option for individual files:

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image1942×364 34.5 KB

I’m not sure there ever was one like this. Only the green “download everything” button on a repo’s main page.

Edit: the current UI also has a “copy to clipboard” button (the one with the two squares). Then you can paste the entire file into, say, Notepad and save it.

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I think it’s always been “right-click on the Raw button, select Save”.

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Is there any update on this? That particular link doesn’t work, and I’m not sure who else has tried to update it.

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Turns out there’s a bug in Inform 10.1 that prevents Consolidated Multiple Actions from working; that’s why I removed it. There’s a version that’ll work in the next release of Inform, but there’s not a schedule for when that will be out.

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Ahh, that makes sense. Thanks for following up! ^ ^’ in that case, i should probably work at a money system that’s more sophisticated than a hundred identical objects lying around haha