Inform and Glulx: announcement

[Graham Nelson]

On Inform and Glulx
===================

"Now I am six
I'm as clever as clever
And I think I'll stay six
For ever and ever."

-- A. A. Milne

Today is Inform's sixth birthday, and Inform 6's third birthday.
Aside from the printed, revised manual (see separate posting),
and the new releases of the compiler and library (likewise),
Andrew Plotkin and I have a joint announcement to make:

Andrew is currently working on modifications to Inform's code
generator which generate story files for a newly-designed virtual
machine, "Glulx", instead of the Z-machine. Glulx removes most of
the fixed limits of the Z-machine; it can support games with more
than 48 attributes, more than 64 common properties, more than 64K of
dynamic data, and so on. It also allows more flexible text and
graphics formatting. The Inform language itself is not changed, and
there will only be one version of the Inform compiler: it will allow
authors to compile the same source code to either Z-code or Glulx
files by setting the right command-line switch. Glulx has
structural similarities to the Z-machine, not surprisingly since
it's being designed as an Inform-compilable format, but omits
some of the more baroque features.

All enquiries on the details of this [1] to Andrew. But it's a
clean and sensible design, and offers people who want to compile
great vertiginous skyscrapers of Inform code a little hope for
the future. Let me emphasize that Inform will remain a Z-machine
compiler with a Glulx switch, not vice versa. For a textual
adventure game no more than about three or four times the size
of a typical Infocom work, the Z-machine remains a fine platform,
and Inform will be compiling to it by default.

Graham Nelson
30 April 1999

[1] "Andrew, isn't Glulx just the weirdest name since Bob Dylan's
children?" springs to mind. I wish you better luck eliciting
an answer than I've had.

--
Graham Nelson | gra...@gnelson.demon.co.uk | Oxford, United Kingdom