I’m completely new to the Inform 7 IDE and wanted to explore/play around with some of the extensions as a means to learn and just become familiar with the coding environment etc. I can see how to download individual extensions or even all 4000-odd at once, but the search box only seems to search the source or documentation. How do I find a specific extension from with the IDE itself to download? When I searched using Google and clicked the download button for the Extension I was looking for, it just opened in a new Tab on my browser as a text file(which confused me!).
I hope this isn’t too stupid a question. I really am new to this.
There used to be a searchable library on the Inform 7 website, but it’s not there at the moment. So you kind of have to open up the headers “Adaptive Prose” “Place” and drill down to what you want.
Just a follow up if I may. I can locate the Extension on the Inform site and it opens in a new browser tab as a text file. I’m assuming this isn’t supposed to be happening and it’s just supposed to offer to save it where I want(which would be the extensions directory I assume). Is there a work-around? Can I save it with some specific file extension so that the Inform IDE will recognise it for example? Or am I missing something and simply overthinking it all?
How are people locating the extensions they require and installing them? It all seems quite unwieldy the way I’m trying to do it.
Extensions are basically just a txt file with a .i7x extension. Instead of opening the file, right click and Save As - make sure it ends in .i7x wherever you download it. Sometimes if you then open that, there may be programming magic that asks you if you want to install it, or you can directly move it into the extensions folder.
Alternately, you can copy the text and save it in a text editor as [extension name].i7x .
I think there’s also a file option in the I7 IDE - either “new extension” or “create extension” which will create an extension project which you can then paste that source text you see into and Inform will save it directly into your extensions folder.
Do be aware that any extensions you find on other sites may not be the most recent version, or could be modified for special use. The ones through the IDE are the “official” ones that should be up-to-date. Inform will sometimes alert you if an extension calls another and you don’t have the specific version it needs.
