New releases: Inform 6.11, Library 6/4
Rick Dague
Graham: Thank You!! Would it be presumptuous to say that all this Inform
users on this newsgroup are very grateful for your work and patience?
:)
Graham Nelson
Updated releases: Inform 6.11 and Library 6/4
=============================================
Inform 6.10 and library 6/3 were substantial upgrades, aimed mainly
at making a major overhaul of the parser (to support translation
to languages other than English) and improving debugging facilities.
Today's releases are strictly maintenance.
The compiler itself is in good shape and I wouldn't be upgrading
it except that one very serious bug has emerged: essentially an
optimisation of some "if" statements was optimising truth into
falsity. This had been happening for a good nine months without
anyone noticing, but I am heartily ashamed. Other alterations
include minor tweaks to assist the Mac port. Still, porters should
find v6.11 easy to accommodate, since the code is hardly altered
from v6.10.
The "new model" parser, as premiered in library 6/3, has been
behaving in slightly quirky ways: well, after a month of
beta-testing by the unwitting denizens of rec.arts.int-fiction,
I've fixed some 17 bugs, listed below. A few of these bugs
impact on game behaviour enough to annoy players seriously,
and I'd advise compiling "production copies" of games -- copies
intended for downloading or publication -- from library 6/4 rather
than 6/3.
Please note that 6/4, like 6/3, can be used with Inform 6.10 or
later (so you can use the upgraded library under v6.10 right away,
without waiting for ports of v6.11 to appear) but not with Inform
v6.0* or earlier.
As a temporary measure, you can get hold of the new material from the
Inform 6 Home Page:
http://www.gnelson.demon.co.uk/inform.html
It will be filed in its proper place at ftp.gmd.de shortly, and then
the temporary uploads page will be taken out.
My thanks, as ever, to those who have emailed me bug reports.
I am always grateful for these, though it can sometimes take me
a couple of weeks to reply when I have a serious email backlog,
for which I apologise. Please try to send me a short piece of
source code demonstrating what you think is wrong, if possible:
this saves on long explanations and makes it much easier for me
to find the problem.
Graham Nelson
27 January 1997
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Extracted from the 6-series library modification history, which
resides on the World Wide Web at:
http://www.gnelson.demon.com/lhistory.html
-------------------------
188. The message "You can't, since the nothing leads nowhere" is no longer
produced when the player tries to go through a door whose designer
has forgotten to specify a "door_to" destination.
189. Singular and plural were the wrong way round for a few library
messages in the 6/3 version of "English.h": thanks to Andreas Hoppler
and Giovanni Riccardi for spotting this.
190. A minor correction has been made to get around a bug in v6.10 of the
compiler (resulting in movement through darkness not properly working).
Thus library 6/4 handles darkness movements properly even if you
haven't got v6.11 or later of the compiler.
191. Likewise to prevent problems with the list manager printing unending
sequences of spaces. (Caused by a bug in Inform 6.10 that's fixed in
6.11.)
192. A bug in disambiguation of "her" (possessive adjective) and "her"
(pronoun) has been removed: it could cause crashes in some difficult
cases, or more probably just a mysterious refusal to understand "her".
193. Commands like "someone, do something" resulted in the error
"I only understood you as far as wanting to someone" (but only in
certain circumstances). Now fixed.
194. Two library messages about inserting X into Y now have X and Y the
right way round. (E.g., library 6/3 would sometimes print "The
diamond is closed.", not "The Faberge diamond case is closed.", in
response to "put diamond in case".)
195. Prepositions sometimes missed out when the parser is printing a
command inferred for lack of input (e.g., "give" printing out
"(the ball the dog)" instead of "(the ball to the dog)". Fixed.
196. Spurious space removed from the message "The dog doesn't seem
interested.".
197. The disambiguator in the parser has been made a little less
trigger-happy (it now asks questions like "Which do you mean...?"
more often, rather than jumping too far to conclusions).
198. The grammar now finally makes "take" and "get" distinct Inform
verbs: this should have no effect except to prevent the parser
from confusing "take on..." with "get on...", "take out..." with
"get out...", etc.
199. The NO_PLACES option works again. (Sorry: I thought I'd fixed
this back at 176 above.)
200. "Search" used to print an oddly truncated sentence when searching
something all of whose contents were "scenery". Fixed.
201. A minor bug in the list-writer to do with concealed and scenery
objects being miscounted; and another bug to do with scenery but
unconcealed contents of an object being listed if they're the
first child of an unconcealed container or supporter, have both
been fixed.
202. Action reversal not working when exactly one of the tokens being
reversed is a "number" or "special". Fixed.
203. Pronouns are quietly set to likely room contents when the player
moves around, in the new parser (as in Infocom's parsers, but unlike
the old Inform parser); in 6/3 this sometimes set them to "concealed"
objects. Fixed.
204. "Time:" being printed twice over on the status line in a
time rather than score/turns game. Fixed.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
Graham Nelson | gra...@gnelson.demon.co.uk | Oxford, United Kingdom
Andrew Plotkin
Graham Nelson (gra...@gnelson.demon.co.uk) wrote:
> 203. Pronouns are quietly set to likely room contents when the player
> moves around, in the new parser (as in Infocom's parsers, but unlike
> the old Inform parser); in 6/3 this sometimes set them to "concealed"
> objects. Fixed.
As per the big pronoun discussion we just got through, could this be made
optional? (With a conditional, much as NO_PLACES is.)
If I'd been playing a game that did this, and I didn't know it was a
library change, I would certainly report it as a bug.
(If I were *writing* a game with 6/4, I'd certainly turn this off myself.
But we also just got through the discussion on hacking the libraries. :-)
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."
Uncle Bob
Graham Nelson (gra...@gnelson.demon.co.uk) wrote:
: Updated releases: Inform 6.11 and Library 6/4
: =============================================
For the impatient among us, PC and Linux ports of this release will
appear by 1 February 1997.
Bob Newell
Graham Nelson
In article <E4swpq.Cuq...@gobblernet.lod.com>, Uncle Bob
<URL:mailto:bne...@gobblernet.lod.com> wrote:
>
> Graham Nelson (gra...@gnelson.demon.co.uk) wrote:
> : Updated releases: Inform 6.11 and Library 6/4
> : =============================================
>
> appear by 1 February 1997.
>
> Bob Newell
Golly gosh Uncle Bob, are you the only person on the planet
who's actually managed to download the wretched files?
Yr frustrated nephew,
G.