I’ve come across an issue with installing and using extensions that aren’t built-into Inform (using the latest build of 7) on a Windows 10 machine.
I download the i7x file and placed it in the extensions folder under the author’s name, like so "My Documents\Inform\Extensions\Mary Brown\Following People.i7x "
When opening Inform again, it notifies me that there is a custom extension installed and highlighted in a blue folder.
However, when trying to Include it in the source, Inform tells me that the extension is not installed.
When trying to replace it from the main menu using the Inform UI (I believe this is the Mac way of installing it) it says the extension already exists.
When prompted to replace it with the new version, an error occurs that says “Failed to install extension.”
If anyone has any suggestions as to how to address this, that would be very much appreciated.
The recommended way of installing extensions on all platforms is to download it somewhere, then choose “Install Extension” from the file menu. It sounds as if some other program had the file open while the front-end was trying to overwrite it. I would suggest deleting the “Mary Brown” directory under “Extensions”, then trying again with the “Install Extension” menu item.
Have you tried manually removing it from where you manually copied it (My Documents\Inform\Extensions\Author\ExtensionName.i7x) and then following the recommended process? It’s probably confused because some parts of the application consider it installed if it’s simply under My Documents\Inform\Extensions, while other parts of the application expect it to be in some other magic list that’s only updated when you officially install it.
I’m trying to install Conversation Package by Eric Eve, but this issue happens with other extensions (such as Aaron Reeds) as well.
I have tried this again with a clean reinstall of Inform and testing this on a Windows 8 machine as well with same results. Thank you for the suggestions.
First things first: “Conversation Package” is one of the extensions included in the Public Library, so the easiest way to install it is from there. Go to the Extensions tab, then the Public Library sub-tab, click Everything and search for Conversation Package. Click Download next to it to download and install it.
However, since other methods of installing extensions haven’t worked, I guess that the Public Library way won’t help either. Have any extensions successfully installed? I’m guessing not, suggesting something odd about your setup. Is there anything obviously unusual in your security settings? What is your username on the machines that this doesn’t work on? Does it contain any unusual characters?
One other thought: the Windows build of Inform has a mechanism to change what directory is used for extension files etc., activated by placing a “home.txt” file containing the directory into the root directory of the Inform installation. You haven’t done this, have you? If there’s a “home.txt” file there delete it and try again.
Hi David, thank you for your continued diligence, it’s very much appreciated. Apparently the Public Library extensions do work and I will install them on that to use for now, though it is a curious issue since this limits the ability of custom extensions to be used.
That the public library works is good news, but that makes the problems with downloading and installing extensions manually even more baffling. All I can think of is that you’ve got some anti-virus software on both machines that’s blocking access for some reason - do you have anything like that? Is it the same on both machines?
