Homer in Silicon

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 Overhaul

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.

More extension updates

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.