Category: parser

Two readings of possible interest

The last couple of days have brought some interesting reads that weren’t announced on RAIF, so I’ll mention them here:

Trotting Krips’ review of Planetfall. I’ve never gotten around to playing this one myself.

Nick Montfort’s dissertation on nn, an IF development system he designed in the course of getting his doctorate at Penn. The dissertation runs to several hundred pages, so it’s not a light read, but I’d recommend a look to those interested in IF theory. Some of what he writes is fairly technical discussion of how his system works, and it’s difficult to judge its merits given that there aren’t any actual games written in it (as he admits himself); on the other hand, he also does a lot of theoretical definition of the different aspects of IF games.

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Whoa! or: Original research on the Crowther and Woods Adventure

Dennis Jerz has just released an article, set for Digital Humanities Quarterly, on the time-line of the original Adventure, together with an analysis of Crowther’s source code and how Woods changed it. There are also photographs of the actual cave rooms that correspond with the game, which are amazing. This is great stuff.

Two really quite minor extensions

Now that the I7 extensions page has RSS, it may be redundant to announce these at all, but I have added two little extensions in the last couple of days. One is called “Modified Exit”, designed to deal more sensibly with cases where the player wants to go somewhere but is sitting on an enterable supporter or is inside an enterable container; it makes a few other tweaks to the standard rules on exiting as well.

The second is even more tiny: Property Checking goes through and makes sure all your rooms and objects have descriptions, as a test. (It will not do this in released games — this is purely a debugging function.) I built it because I was startled to find in my (slowly ongoing) Floatpoint revision that I had one or two things about which the player could still see nothing special. Oops.

Minor improvements

The Inform extensions page has now been upgraded so that

  • The defunct “(compatible with 4S08)” tags have been removed, since they’re no longer relevant; all extensions on the page have been re-
    tested as of this afternoon and those that do not compile (and there are only a couple) have been marked accordingly.
  • Extensions are now time-stamped with the date of last modification. (At the moment everything is registered to today, but new extensions will be correctly stamped as they are added.)
  • New or recently updated extensions are now marked “new” or “updated.”
  • Some new categories have been added to make things easier to find.
  • A table of contents appears at the head of the page to make navigation easier; this also shows in which categories new or updated extensions have been filed.
  • The site now has an RSS feed which will automatically carry information on any new and updated extensions as they are added.