[i7] Simple Chat by Mark Tilford breaking 6M62?

So, I just updated today to 6M62 (after a long hiatus from Inform 7 and interactive fiction in general) and it works great, as far as I could tell. However, I needed a conversation extension for a new project (well, an old project that had little work on it that I returned to) and I decided that menu-based was the way I wanted to go with it. Long story short, I downloaded Mark Tilford’s Simple Chat and placed it in my extensions. For whatever reason, without even including the extension within my code (you know, “Include Simple Chat by Mark Tilford.”) Inform 7 decided it could no longer save my project. No matter what I did — restarting Inform 7, deleting Simple Chat from my extensions folder, etc. — Inform 7 could not save my project. It took a fresh install to allow me to save again. Just to be thorough, I added Simple Chat to extensions again several times, and each time it broke Inform (I tried maybe three or four times).

I guess this is sort of a PSA. It may or may not happen to you, but before putting it in your extensions I would save whatever projects you have open.

This is also sort of me asking if there are any other good menu-based conversation extensions out there.

(NOTE: There was no crash log or anything like that, just a window popping up when I tried to save saying “Failed to save project.” I also know that Simple Chat was made to work with 6G60, but that version was released almost 6 years ago, so I assume that if it broke any of the versions between then and now, someone would have said something… Maybe someone has and I just haven’t look hard enough.)

This is bizarre. I really hope someone with better Inform insight can elucidate what might be going on here.

This is very bizarre. Which OS are you on? (Crashing like that sounds like a problem in the interface, not in core Inform itself.) Can you install other extensions without problems?

I’m on Windows 7. And yes, I can download, install and use other extensions without any problem. What perplexes me the most is that I don’t even have to use the extension, I simply place the .i7x file in the correct folder (Mark Tilford within Extensions) and Inform 7 refuses to let me save. Luckily I save very often and did so just before I put the fresh download (from the Inform 7 website) in the folder, so I lost nothing.

Very, very bizarre indeed.

Is there no newer version of Simple Chat? I’ve used it in quite a few of my works in progress (still using 6G60) and it’s pretty useful for choice-based conversations. If it’s no longer being worked on, are there any easy to use alternatives?

What happens if you download the file to somewhere else on your computer, open it, and use the “Install” button? That’s how I usually install new extensions (I’m on a Mac, though, so the details of the interface may be slightly different).

The version here (now maintained by Victor Gijsbers) seems to be working with 6M62 (in the sense that once I installed it as above, the example compiled and ran), though it doesn’t have rule response texts.