Month: April 2011

IF Demo Fair: Desiring Flights and other interactive poetry

Desiring Flights (Barry Moon and Chris Danowski) is a word-centric work, though with strong visual elements in two of its three levels; I might be inclined to call it interactive poetry, but I’m not sure that’s the best description given that the words were as often props as they were objects of contemplation in their own right. To the extent that this piece belongs to an existing genre or formal tradition, though, it’s not one I know especially well; so rather than attempt a more formal critique, I’ll just give some subjective impressions.

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IF Demo Fair: Lessons Learned

Several people have suggested to me that we should do more demo fairs in the future. I’m not done wrapping up the last tasks for this one — I’m still finishing the SPAG coverage, and I owe mail to some authors — so the prospect of running one again myself is vaguely daunting. But in case it’s useful in the future, here are some postmortem thoughts.

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More Extension Updates

Have just sent in a couple of fixes for extensions to do with description.

Version 10 of Room Description Control: a minor fix to get rid of deprecated phrases. If you’re not worried about the presence of “change foo to bar”, there’s no need to update this one.

Version 4 of Single Paragraph Description: a significant bug fix. Changes to Inform internals meant that SPD was incorrectly noting which items needed to be reported in the room description. The new version gets rid of the crufty I6 inclusions of the previous version — which weren’t working right now anyway — and replaces them with native I7. It also introduces the feature of respecting BRIEF and SUPERBRIEF: in those cases, it won’t print the description text for the current room, but will still list non-scenery items.

These should show up on the extensions website soon.