on Love and Death: Bitten, a hidden object game with some Twilight-esque aspirations. For the genre it belongs to, it does quite a few things right — I don’t love hidden object gameplay as a rule, but this was much better than most, and did an above-average job of making the mechanics and the story fit together.
That said, at the end of the day the story it’s telling just isn’t very good — for reasons that overlap with not-very-good stories in many other games.
Extension-mania continues. I know that the use option syntax didn’t get fixed for Locksmith, Plurality, or Complex Listing, so that these still show up some problems if you “use no deprecated features”. I’m chagrined about that, and I apologize: we automatically checked them all to account for the deprecation of procedural rules, but apparently not a second time after we deprecated the old use option syntax.
Those extensions have been fixed and the new versions sent to Graham for the next build; I have also sent updates to the extensions site so that people will be able to download and use them in the meantime.
I am also gradually working through my stock of not-built-in extensions to clear out their deprecated features — and, in some cases, to tidy up extensions from 2007 and 2008 that used considerably clumsier syntax. I’ve just sent in new versions of Facing (which became about a third shorter because the Standard Rules now have better phrases for finding information about the map) and Empty Transfer (which became about a third shorter because it was written before “Check an actor…” was possible, so there were lots and lots of duplicate action rules for the player and for other actors).
Status Line Removal is updated too, though with a cut-back in functionality: changes in the Glulx template make it impossible to remove the Glulx status line in the way I had been doing it, so it is now z-machine-only again.
There are quite a few of these, though, and it will take me a while to go through. To the best of my knowledge I have corrected those extensions that outright won’t compile with 6E59, except that Ordinary Room Description is not supported any further (so I didn’t even check it out). That leaves quite a few that have deprecated content, though.
So: if you are working with an extension of mine and you’d like to see it prioritized, let me know and I’ll move it to the top of my revision list. Or, even better, if you’re working with an extension of mine that you’ve already hacked to take out the deprecated syntax and you want to email it over here, I’ll check it out and post it with my thanks.
Quoted from comments on my parsing article, to increase the attention range:
This is a bit late, but I posted some mock-ups of interfaces without a command line, and I’m hoping for input from the community. — Horace Torys
I have now posted v2 of Measured Liquid, which gets around an Inform bug that creates some problems compiling to the Z-machine. If you’re compiling to Glulx anyway, this shouldn’t affect you; otherwise you may want a new copy.
Also up is a new version of Simple Graphics Window, upgraded for 6E59. If you run it and have trouble with a problem message saying you need a newer version of Glulx Entry Points, please note: a correct version of GEP is included inside your Inform build, but it is possible that if you had installed some intermediate version yourself in your personal extensions directory, that version will interfere with compilation. You should uninstall any version of GEP older than version 8, and rely on the built-in version.
A couple of days ago, I received from Ian Millington an email that may interest people who have been playing around with alternatives to parsing.
I really enjoyed the long-form post on Parsing and alternative types of IF. It reminded me that I had an almost complete hybrid CYOA / IF system on my hard-drive. So I dusted it out and made it open source and put it online.
A trivial (two state) example is at: http://idm.me.uk/undum/tutorial.html (no loading progress bar yet, so wait until the images load).
And the code is available from: http://github.com/idmillington/undum
The code requires a modern (non-IE) browser. The key point is that it is implemented in Javascript, so there’s no need to fake the ability to do proper processing. You can auto-generate text from state, create random events, timing, etc. The kinds of things you can do with any full IF language.
Although the dedicated documentation is pretty scant, the source code is very thoroughly commented (e.g.
http://github.com/idmillington/undum/blob/master/media/js/undum.js).
I haven’t played with it very much yet, but I do admire the pretty presentation style in the tutorial. It appears to share some features of the Choice Of… games, such as tracking of stats and branching/rejoining story paths. What it does differently: all text from previous attempts is retained, rather than clearing the screen, so what you get is a continuous narrative. The typography is attractive, and images can be included as embellishments.
Those interested in this space should check it out.
Edited to add: the code and examples are now available from undum.com instead.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 