Category: Inform 7

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.

Minor extension updates: Approaches, Measured Liquid

Just mailed off a couple of extension updates:

Version 4 of Measured Liquid fixes a bug whereby unblocking the rule against swimming in a lake didn’t actually make it possible for the player to swim there. A new example tests this behavior to guarantee its compliance in future builds. There is also a tiny cosmetic tweak to a situation that arose only when an NPC had been commanded to drink a liquid and that was producing the output

Clark drinks the crantini, leaving the empty cocktail glass empty.

The first “empty” is now omitted from output, as it was for the player.

Version 4 of Approaches removes remaining deprecated “change” phrases (I swear I thought I’d already taken care of that, but hey ho) and also gets rid of a bug that produced a runtime error in the example “Easy Keys.” (Tighter type-checking in Inform wasn’t letting it get away with something that had worked previously.)

These should appear on the Inform extension page in due course.

Hadean Lands

I was going to post here about Hadean Lands, the new game Andrew Plotkin is writing, and how you can contribute via Kickstarter to get this thing fully funded.

Events have outrun me, and it’s already fully funded — which is awesome. But it’s not too late to contribute anyway! And here’s why you should:

  • Contributing is the only way to get yourself a PC/Mac version of the game when it comes out. It’s otherwise going to be released for iOS only. There’s a short, playable trailer available, so you can see for yourself what kind of a thing this is going to be.
  • The more Andrew’s funding goes over minimum, the more time he’ll be able to devote to being a full-time IF author and tool-maker. And that’s important because, in addition to releasing the game, he’s planning to share the tools for other people to release iOS games.
  • Also on the agenda is to polish up the browser-based Quixe interpreter, adding CSS support, javascript integration, and graphics.

If you’re keen to see more accessible IF on more platforms, this is a great way to help make that happen.

Glulx Entry Points version 8 troubleshooting

Because I’ve gotten a couple of emails about this now:

The latest version of Glulx Entry Points is version 8. That is the version included inside the Inform package, if you download the latest Inform.

There are other dependent extensions (such as my Graphical Window extension and the related Location Images extension) that require at least Glulx Entry Points version 7. If you include one of those dependent extensions and compile, you may get a problem message saying that you require Glulx Entry Points version 7. (Version 8 will do for this purpose; it just won’t accept anything *earlier* than version 7.)

If you get that message:
— make sure you have the latest version of Inform, which has version 8 of Glulx Entry Points;
— make sure that you are not overriding this extension. You might have an older version of GEP installed in your user extension folder, in which case Inform will look there first. This is not a bug: we want authors to be able to use older extension versions if they need to for compatibility on legacy projects. But it does mean that if you have, say, GEP v6 installed in your user folder, Inform will find that first, in preference to the version 8 extension included in the package. If you remove or delete that version of the extension, Inform will be able to find v8 again.

Here ends the public service announcement.