Inform 7 Gems – Is Transcription On?

As I was poking around the forums the other day, I realized how much information is buried in the forums.  Things I might not even think to search on or are difficult to find even when looking.  And when you do find something, it’s often difficult to piece the useful information together from a long thread.

With that in mind, I’m going to start a series of posts, starting with this one, on things I’ve found in the forums or elsewhere that I find interesting or useful and try to put them in nice digestible bites.  I hope to educate myself through this process and hopefully they’ll be of use to others as well.

Are we transcripting?

My first gem was suggested to me by Andrew Schultz.  Back in 2012 he had started a thread entitled I7 – Check if transcripting is on when noting?  The basic premise behind the post was checking if transcripting is turned on.  As I talked about in my previous post on easy transcription notes, Andrew was doing something similar, but as an added bonus, wanted to check if the transcription was turned on and if so, at a minimum warn the user that it wasn’t turned on.  Very useful for beta-testing and I myself often forget to turn on transcription.

With some help from zarf and others, what we end up with is pretty useful.

Include (-
[ CheckTranscriptStatus;
#ifdef TARGET_ZCODE;
return ((0-->8) & 1);
#ifnot;
return (gg_scriptstr ~= 0);
#endif;
];
-).

To decide whether currently transcripting: (- CheckTranscriptStatus() -)

ignore-transcript-nag is a truth state that varies.

After reading a command:
	if the player's command matches the regular expression "^\*.+":
		if currently transcripting:
			say "Noted.";
		otherwise:
			if ignore-transcript-nag is false:
				say "You've made a comment-style command, but Transcript is off. Type TRANSCRIPT to turn it on, if you wish to make notes.[paragraph break]The long version of this nag will only appear once. You may press any key to continue.";
				wait for any key;
				now ignore-transcript-nag is true;
			else:
				say "(Comment not sent to transcript.)";
		reject the player's command.

What we have is some I6 code that is checking a flag (different depending on zcode vs glulx) that when the user enters a note command, it checks to see if transcription is on and warns the user if it is not.

We can even take it one step further and add this line of code if it is not on:

try switching the story transcript on;

This will prompt the user to turn on transcription and should work in either zcode or glulx.

I seeing more and more that I really need to dive into I6 more to see the possibilities that I may be missing.

Edit: changed the regular expression to work around the I7 bug mentioned in the comments.