Old text adventures had a "press space" to continue when there was lots of text. Does Inform7?

Authoring Inform 7
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I’m really prevailing upon this resource today, so thanks in advance.

When I first had a computer and text adventures were the pinnacle there used to be games where only a certain amount of text would be shown and you had to press space to continue the text.

I’m not even sure what I would call this to search for it. Is this something that still exists?

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Yeah, this is easy to do in Inform 7 – simplest way is to use one of the built-in extensions, Emily Short’s Basic Screen effects. Just put this line in your code (probably somewhere high up):

Include Basic Screen Effects by Emily Short.

Then you can do things like this:

	Say "This is a long block of text.[paragraph break](Press any key to continue)[paragraph break]";
	Wait for any key;
	Say "Here's the next long block of text."

There’s also a “wait for the SPACE key” instruction if you want to get more specific – you can check out the full documentation using the IDE’s Extension tab.

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Yet again, a lead-off home run!

Thank you @DeusIrae

For future reference, what is this feature called?

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Of course! The documentation calls this “waiting for a keypress” so I’d just go with that for the name, I guess.

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The docs discuss waiting for a keypress here but don’t really offer a discrete name for it.

Note that many (probably most) modern interpreters do this automatically when there’s more than one screenful of text (and I suspect I7’s docs don’t even mention it, it being interpreter behavior). Mike’s advice applies when you want to impose such a pause manually.

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