Inform 7: Menus version 3

In 2014 I wrote an updated version of Emily Short's venerable Menus extension. Right after I completed it, the huge upgrade of Inform (6L02) came out and the extension broke.

Kind people posted a supposedly fixed version of my Menus to Github, but it wasn't really fixed – don't use that one, which is version 2. Then the project was in limbo for ages because I didn't want to touch the new Inform until after I'd finished Leadlight Gamma.

Yesterday I finally got around to working out what broke in my extension (indexed text substitutions) and fixed it. So today I present Menus version 3, which is good for 6L38 and should be good for 6L02:

Download the menus_v3.zip from my dropbox

In the zip you will find the files Menus.i7x and Basic Help Menu.i7x

(There is a degree of chaos in the I7 extensions management world at the moment. I just want to say that if you're one of those people helpfully filing stuff in Github or whatever, please feel free to file these appropriately. Thanks.)

Here's the summary of the extension from the docs, then I'll give a bit more detail:

Lets you include a menu system of help, hints and/or other information in your Glulx or Z-Code project. This is an upgrade of Emily Short's Menus extension featuring user-friendly single keypress controls and a more sophisticated UI. It also has configurable options, a book mode with automatic pagination, isolated message content to make translation to other languages easier and a Screen Reader mode. Old Menus format tables can be upgraded for use with this extension with a little work.

So first, there is no more moving a cursor around with arrow keys to choose things. Every option is activated by an automatically assigned keypress.

There is no more of the repeated transcript clutter that used to happen with the original Menus.

You don't have to back out of all menus to get back to the game. You can exit straight to the game with a keypress (your position is bookmarked for your return). You can also jump to the topmost menu at anytime while in the menus.

You can still use the hint-dispensing mode familiar from the original Menus.

You can toggle screen reader compatibility at any time.

The extension no longer relies on the ESC key, so it's compatible with virtual devices which don't offer one.

The extension always shows contextually-sensitive instructions in the status window, or in the main window if you're using a screen reader.

All content is automatically paginated for a book mode (move through all content with left and right arrow keys). You can let the player switch between menu and book mode as they please, or you can force one or the other. In book mode, hints can be gathered at the back of the book, with warnings about their location. Or you can just block them from book mode.

If you're having trouble compiling your menu system, there's a debug mode which shows everything that's happening during the startup scan of your content. The extension can diagnose a few common errors itself.

The 'you can't choose option H' bug from previous versions is gone. (Thanks Hanon Ondricek)

Finally, if you happen to want ye olde Basic Help Menu, I've also made a compatible version of that.

... So if you're in the market for a menus extension for your brand new Inform game, I encourage you to use this one. It's modern, extensively documented and accessibility-friendly.

Also, in the selfish reasons department, I don't want to move a cursor around with arrow keys in your game anymore. Sorry, but in these shiny times, that's too angrifying.