Temporarily disabling an extension

Authoring Inform 7
1

Is it possible to “turn off” an extension at a point in my game, and reactivate it later on?

2

No.

3

I think you’ll have to adjust things at the level of individual rules or specific rulebooks. For now you might use a procedural rule to tell the game to ignore certain rules or rulebooks, during a particular part of the game.

4

Well, yeah, that’s what I meant to say.

5

tl;dr

I’m thinking maybe I could modify the extension code to add ‘when’ clauses, then use a flag to activate/deactivate the code. Are procedural rules strictly necessary?

6

Procedural rules are never necessary (and they’re going away eventually). You can always modify rules with “when” clauses, as you note.

7

Probably it depends on the extension. Which extension are you using?

To see how it can depend, let’s say you’re using Assorted Text Generation by Emily Short, which defines a bunch of text substitutions like “[in-on the item]” (which is “[in the item]” if the item is a container and “[on the item]” if it isn’t) or “[ordinal of N]” (which writes “first,” “second,” etc. depending on what number N is). It wouldn’t make any sense to temporarily disable this – what that would mean is that suddenly a bunch of the text substitutions in your code would be invalid and should produce compile errors, but of course by then they’re already compiled.

Whereas I can see what it would mean to turn off something like Disambiguation Control – you’d go back to the normal disambiguation behavior for a while. (Except I’m sure you can’t do this, because Disambiguation Control rips out a bunch of the parser and replaces it with other stuff; you’d have to be some kind of I6 wizard to make a toggleable version, where “wizard” at least means “someone who understands a little bit of I6.”)

So yeah, it seems like it’d depend on the extension.

8

Thanks for the advice, all. I’m being purposefully vague as to the extension I have in mind, but if I run into trouble I’ll let you know. I suppose the best solution would be to try and avoid the extension and try to code the required behaviour myself… Eep.