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§2.10. Installing extensions
The original Inform of 1993 provided no special facilities for "extensions" - in effect, additional packets of rules providing extra features - but the creation and circulation of these extensions soon became a flourishing part of Inform culture. Today's Inform actively promotes sharing of such extensions, both to bring writers together and to support good practice. For the user of an extension, the advantage is clear: why go to great trouble to (say) work out how to make doors open automatically as needed, when somebody else has already perfected this? For the writer of an extension, there is the satisfaction of producing a good solution to a ticklish problem, and contributing to the public good.
Newcomers will probably not need extensions for quite some while, but there is nothing difficult about using them, so a few brief notes are worth giving here. (The final chapter of the documentation covers the writing of new extensions.)
Extensions are identified by name (say "Following People") and also by author (say "Mary Brown"). They need to be installed before they can be used, which means downloading them from the Internet. By far the easiest way to do this is to use the Public Library feature of Inform: then the application can do everything, letting us either choose individual extensions or download them en masse. But it's also possible to install extensions by hand.
When using Inform on Mac OS X, use the File menu item Show Extensions Folder to open the relevant folder in the Finder. Each author has a subfolder of this folder, and his or her extensions live inside it.
When using Inform on Windows, this means storing them in the folder
Each author has a subfolder of this folder, and his or her extensions live inside it. Our example extension should therefore be placed as:
My Documents\Inform\Extensions\Mary Brown\Following People.i7x
When using Inform on Linux, this means storing them in the folder
where "~" signifies your home folder. (This will have been created for you the first time you ran i7.) Each author has a subfolder of this folder, and his or her extensions live inside it. Our example extension should therefore be placed as:
When using Inform on Linux, this means storing them in the folder
where "~" signifies your home folder. (This will have been created for you the first time you ran i7.) Each author has a subfolder of this folder, and his or her extensions live inside it. Our example extension should therefore be placed as:
In fact, though, Inform can automatically install extensions for us: we need only select the "Install Extension..." item on the File menu.
The actual extension file should always be named with a ".i7x" suffix, meaning "I7 extension" - for instance, "Following People.i7x".
To provide an example, Emily Short's useful extension "Locksmith" is one of a small number of extensions which come ready-installed as part of the basic Inform package, and need not be downloaded and installed.
Each time that Inform translates any source text, it performs a quick check of the extensions available, and updates its own internal records. A directory of the extensions currently installed can be found by clicking on "Installed Extensions" from the Extensions panel. This is also worth visiting in order to browse the Public Library, a selection of extensions contributed by Inform users.