Inform 7 - Beginner: Adventure Book / Hybrid Choices (or something similar)?

Hi All: I’m new to Inform 7. I’m interesting in authoring with a multi-choice (cyoa) format. In particular, I was interested in using Adventure Book by Edward Griffiths or Hybrid Choices. But these extensions no longer seems to work with the latest Inform 7 download, nor can I find it in the official Extensions library. Are there any recent equivalents? I read something about maybe using the Unified Glulx Input for this, but that extension seems a bit advanced/confusing for my purposes. Any advice is appreciated. Thank you in advance.

The version in the extensions github compiles.

Thanks. I think I got the Extension to install. But every time I try to create a simple 2 paragraph file, I get this message (below) and seems to reference code inside the extension. Not sure if this is a newbie mistake on my part, or perhaps Adventure Book just doesn’t work anymore with recent releases of Inform 7? Is this extension still actively used? Seeing the last commit was 2014, perhaps there is something more recent for CYOA?

Report on Translation: Failed
Produced by Inform 7 (build 6M62)
Problem. You wrote 'change option entry to the possibility’

EDIT: UPDATE: Okay, looks like I found a possible fix here… What are my CYOA options in I7?
“you need to replace “change…to…” with “now…is…” in the new versions of I7. It’s an old deprecated syntax that was finally removed in 6L02.”
Still, I wonder if this is not something more up-to-date that works with modern I7 out of the box.

I can’t help with your debug, but would you mind clarifying: are you trying to write an entire choice-based game in Inform, or a parser game with some choices? (Is there any particular reason why you’ve chosen Inform rather than Twine, I mean?)

1 Like

I’m considering Twine for fully choice-based as well. I was attracted to Adventure Book because of the wide portability and existing text-to-speech software available with ZCode interpreters. But perhaps Twine is the common way to go these days. Thanks.

For future reference, when reporting issues it helps to include the actual source text causing the problems. We can’t see your monitor from here. :slight_smile:

FWIW, the text change option entry to the possibility does not appear anywhere in the extension itself or its examples, so I’m not sure where you got that syntax from. Did you install the wrong version of the extension, perhaps? Or read some outdated documentation?

Hi @mirality : You are right. The old syntax was from line 212 of an earlier version of the extension (1/110101 ). It seems my attempt to git clone the file didn’t actually replace a copy I got back from October 2020, clearly from some older source no doubt.

Version 1/110101, line 212
if the possibility is valid and the possibility is not a use:
choose a blank row in the Table of Options;
change option entry to the possibility;

Whereas version 1/140513 from the git hub extensions repository does indeed compile, once downloaded correctly. Thanks!

I just wanted to add that a working version of “Hybrid Choices” can be found here:

2 Likes