Tag: Inform

I7: New Version Up

For those who don’t follow rec.arts.int-fiction, there is a new release of Inform 7. In addition to fixing over a hundred bugs reported in the previous release, it provides dynamic string handling for the first time, and regular-expression matching.

This means that it’s possible to (for instance) run regular expressions on the player’s command to modify it before parsing; that it’s possible to make any “to say” phrase produce upper-, lower-, title-, or sentence-cased output; and that it’s easier to store and read back text files for use by Glulx.

There are other goodies too.

Re. Floatpoint v2

Since several people have contacted me about this in the last couple of days (it seems to happen in waves): no, a new build of Floatpoint is not imminent. I realize it is annoying that the current build has a few bugs, one of them unsightly, and I agree it’s not entirely recommendable to new players in the current state. But I am, at this point, disinclined to release a build that only fixes those problems, because feedback indicates that what the game really needs is a rewrite: for best effect, it needs to be a four- to six-hour piece, featuring much more conversation with significant characters, more internal structure, better exploration of the back-story and justification of the central problem, and so on.

I am working towards this, in various ways, but it is not likely to be done in the near future; and (perhaps obviously) Inform 7 support also consumes a fair amount of my available time.

Anyway, I apologize to those who are vexed by this, but that is the state of affairs.

Tiny new extension

Have added a “Mood Variations” extension to let authors mark up text to have varying effects depending on the mood of the person currently spoken to. It’s meant to be compatible with several approaches to conversation (and uses the same “current interlocutor” variable as Eric Eve’s conversation extensions). The “[set {mood}]” token then also lets you set the NPC’s current mood in the middle of other text.

Not a huge deal, really.

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.

Continue reading “Two readings of possible interest”

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.