[I am posting the following at Graham Nelson's request, because it is not currently possible for him to do so himself:]
Many small and medium-sized games have been written during the development of the forthcoming Inform 7 design system for IF. Some are used for testing, others were simply experiments, but most are intended as illustrative samples. More than 200 of these will appear in the documentation, but they necessarily show off one trick each: so we wanted also to offer a few larger-scale "worked examples". Though not enormous, these are too long to be included verbatim in any book, and their full source text will instead be published on the Inform website when Inform 7 reaches its public beta. In the mean time, we would like to release three of these example games for the community to play. All have been beta-tested by players, and while they should not be taken too seriously, we hope they may be fun. Each comes with a "feelie" booklet, presented in PDF format, from its own web page: the links are given below.
At present, these story files can probably be played only on Windows, Mac OS X and some Unix-based systems running X-Windows, since they are presented as Blorb 2.0-wrapped Z-machine story files: they include cover art and bibliographic metadata. This will be the standard format generated by Inform 7, so another purpose of the present release is to offer the Z-machine community some samples to experiment with. See below for details.
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Reliques of Tolti-Aph Graham Nelson (2005)
It used to be said that there are two kinds of magic-user: those who have been to Tolti-Aph, and charlatans. It used to be generally understood that the attempt to prove oneself in the unforgiving society of Tolti-Aph was a bid for rapid level advancement or else romantic, thin-young-mage-in-midnight-black-robes death. The closer you get to the wilderness spot vaguely marked "Tholtaff" on the agate globe in your great-great-grandfather's study, the better the alternative sounds: settling down in some coastal village, perhaps, a little weathermongering, some polymancy, and helping out with the nets after a bad storm. Retire at maybe level 3, with most of your experience points gained from observing rare fish-based poisons carry off those villagers careless about gutting. Publish an awesomely tedious monograph on the correct usage of the "untangle rigging" spell. You know, the good life.
When the seventh day comes and it is time for you to return to the castle in the forest, your sisters cling to your sleeves.
"Don't go back," they say, and "When will we ever see you again?" But since they've filled the time by telling you every word spoken to them by every male in the village, you imagine they will find consolation somewhere.
Your father hangs back, silent and moody. He has spent the week as far from you as possible, working until late at night. Now he speaks only to ask whether the Beast treated you "properly." From his tone of voice, he is obviously inquiring after your virtue, not anything so irrelevant as your health, comfort, or peace of mind.
You might not have thought it possible, but you are looking forward to getting back...
Bronze is a puzzle-oriented adaptation of Beauty and the Beast with an expansive geography for the inveterate explorer.
Features help for novice players, a detailed adaptive hint system to assist players who get lost, and a number of features to make navigating a large space more pleasant.
14 AD. Agrippa Postumus, grandson of the recently-deceased Augustus, tries to avoid death at the hands of the next emperor, Tiberius. At his disposal: a couple of old manuscripts, a lamp, and a recalcitrant slave. And a powerful knowledge of the Art of Venus Genetrix, of course -- the magic eventually known as the Lavori d'Aracne.
Damnatio Memoriae belongs to a series with the author's previous game Savoir-Faire; though it can stand alone, the game's mechanics will make most sense to players already familiar with that work.
It is a fast, timed game, taking only a few minutes to play once, but probably requiring multiple attempts to bring to a satisfactory conclusion.
The story files for these three games are standard-compliant Z-machine story files, but each is "blorbed". This means that it is bundled together with a cover picture and some bibliographic information inside a Blorb wrapper. The Blorb standard for gathering IF resources together was set down by Andrew Plotkin in 2001, and was documented in the Inform 6 Designer's Manual. At present relatively few "blorbs", as blorbed files are called, are in circulation. But Inform 7 may change this, since it publishes games as blorbs by default. Blorbing is Inform 7's equivalent of binding a paper publication: it attaches outer covers, adding a cover picture and descriptive matter to help identify the book within.
So these new games are only playable using an interpreter capable of reading blorbed Z-machine story files. We recommend:
Windows Frotz for Windows, maintained by David Kinder http://www.d.kinder.btinternet.co.uk/frotz.html The current version reads and plays blorbed story files, but does not yet display cover art.
Zoom for Mac OS X, maintained by Andrew Hunter http://www.logicalshift.co.uk/unix/zoom/ Version 1.0.5 alpha 1 is required. Zoom behaves like iTunes: it will store any blorb it plays into a library, and displays the bibliographic information in a browser in much the same way that iTunes displays song information. Zoom also tidily stores saved game files associated with each game, and is generally much to be recommended. (Click the double-arrow button at the bottom right of the iFiction library window to see more information about games, including the cover art and detailed description.)
A more basic version of Zoom is also available for Unix-like systems running X-Windows, and we believe this will also be able to play blorbs: here we recommend version 1.0.4a.
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The Blorb format has itself been extended to facilitate this new usage, and a new version 2.0 of the specification has just been published by Andrew Plotkin:
(Blorb is extensible, so new blorbs do comply with the old standard: but they contain extra data which will be invisible to older blorb-reading programs. The changes to the standard specify this extra data.) Further details are being posted to the Z-machine and Inform maintenance mailing lists.
For those on OS X who prefer Cugel: you may have to change the extension of these games to get them to work (to z8). It won't open .zblorb, and it thinks .blb is a glulxe game.
I'd be interested to find out what these examples were designed to exemplify, other than (presumably) good programming style in Inform. Normally when I write an "example," I'm trying to feature something(s) in particular. Is that what's going on here?
steve.bres...@gmail.com wrote: > I'd be interested to find out what these examples were designed to > exemplify, other than (presumably) good programming style in Inform. > Normally when I write an "example," I'm trying to feature something(s) > in particular. Is that what's going on here?
Not exactly, or, at least, not in a way that will necessarily be obvious from playing them rather than from looking at the code. Many examples of specific features are written into the documentation; these show how to put the bits together, for several different styles of game.
On 1 Mar 2006 21:52:46 -0800, jameshcunning...@gmail.com wrote:
>For those on OS X who prefer Cugel: you may have to change the >extension of these games to get them to work (to z8). It won't open >.zblorb, and it thinks .blb is a glulxe game.
The same applies for those Windows users who prefer Gargoyle.
> > I'd be interested to find out what these examples were designed to > > exemplify, other than (presumably) good programming style in Inform. > > Normally when I write an "example," I'm trying to feature something(s) > > in particular. Is that what's going on here?
> Not exactly, or, at least, not in a way that will necessarily be > obvious from playing them rather than from looking at the code.
No, I'm just wondering if there's anything in the gameplay which exposes what players can look forward to for Inform-7 games in the future. Or if the features are more for the game-writer's convenience, say, rather than something the player can appreciate.
Judging from the studied vagueness of the answer, I'll assume that we're intentionally avoiding talking about features of Inform-7, 'til later. In the interim, I'll take these "examples" as examples only of how badly is declined the subtle art of thinking up a decent title.... Not that titles are all that important, I guess; I can still enjoy the game anyway.
But, I mean, when I'm on the bus or the subway, and I'm reading a book with a bad title, I always take care that none of the other passgeners gets a glance at the cover. This is not only out of respect for the other riders, but frankly because I can get pretty embarassed looking like the kind of guy who would read a book entitled "Lady Audley's Secret," or "Tractatus: Logico Philosophicus" or some other nonsense. I guess it's not so bad when nobody can see me, but still I try to forget it's happening.... After all, I reassure myself, it *can* be a good work, even if it does have a really bad title.
I hope the games can be un-blorbed because I think very few people will release the .z5 or .z8 to play with on handhelds, and they will only release blorbs even if they don't use multimedia features...
[Emily Short graciously releasing two games in Inform 7]
Imagine a small group of fiction writers inventing the typewriter, but instead of going public with their invention keeping the secret to themselves. Well, not really a stricto sensu secret, because now and then they would show a typewritten manuscript to a friend and explain how much faster and more comfortable their invention was compared to writing by hand. The friend would then beg to loan it, or buy it, or even be allowed a glimpse of the miraculous machine, but they would remain firm in their refusal. "So why did you show me the manuscript? Just to rub my nose in it?" the friend would ask. "Oh, fear not," the secret-keeper would say, "We do intend to release it. We're just not saying when. If you behave, maybe soon. If you don't..."
> steve.bres...@gmail.com wrote: >> I'd be interested to find out what these examples were designed to >> exemplify, other than (presumably) good programming style in Inform. >> Normally when I write an "example," I'm trying to feature something(s) >> in particular. Is that what's going on here?
> Not exactly, or, at least, not in a way that will necessarily be > obvious from playing them rather than from looking at the code. Many > examples of specific features are written into the documentation; these > show how to put the bits together, for several different styles of > game.
I'm sure the community appreciates the release of these games, if ony as a demonstration that some development system exists to create them. However, I'm not sure what kind of response this will generate if the games themselves do not demonstrate new facets of the development system that can be experienced by the player. For instance, the release of Curses wowed the community with its sophistication and its infocom style. As a flagship for Inform this game demonstrated to the player that a system existed that could be used to develop a game as cool as Curses.
But as showcase features, and particularly as their release coincides with another thread on the newsgroup that expresses curiosity and frustration over the lack of information regarding why an Inform author should be looking forward to the upcoming release of the new system, I think these releases might only serve to exacerbate the frustration of certain game authors. Not having played these games yet, what we are apparently being told is that these new games do not exhibit any features in their gameplay that will distinguish them from any other game being developed under current systems, and worse yet, that a limited number of interpreters exist to showcase the features that a gameplayer could experience.
Certainly, as a system developer, and at this stage of the development cycle, where flagship games have been released to the general public, there would exist some core elements of the new system which are stable enough that they are unlikely to be significantly altered prior to public release, and that the developer could use to generate some positive PR to whet the appetites of future consumers in a positive way. The last thing you want to do before releasing a much anticipated movie is to expose the audience to trailers that produce an "Hmmmm... interesting..." reaction.
We are, after all, speaking to some of the community's top showmen. And I mean this in the very professional sense of the word. By all means develop the system as you please, but don't forget to razzle-dazzle your adoring public!
Kevin Forchione wrote: > However, > I'm not sure what kind of response this will generate if the games > themselves do not demonstrate new facets of the development system that can > be experienced by the player.
Sorry, that's not at all what I meant. I took the previous question to mean, "is there some single feature or cluster of features that each of these is supposed to point out?" -- to which the answer is, from the player's perspective, no. From a *coding* perspective, yes, different games make use of different elements of the system -- especially in the case of Damnatio Memoriae -- but that's not much help from here.
Jacek Pudlo wrote: > [Emily Short graciously releasing two games in Inform 7]
> Imagine a small group of fiction writers inventing the typewriter, but > instead of going public with their invention keeping the secret to > themselves. Well, not really a stricto sensu secret, because now and then > they would show a typewritten manuscript to a friend and explain how much > faster and more comfortable their invention was compared to writing by hand. > The friend would then beg to loan it, or buy it, or even be allowed a > glimpse of the miraculous machine, but they would remain firm in their > refusal. "So why did you show me the manuscript? Just to rub my nose in it?" > the friend would ask. "Oh, fear not," the secret-keeper would say, "We do > intend to release it. We're just not saying when. If you behave, maybe soon. > If you don't..."
When a language and a compiler, and a library spec and its implementation, are all still being developed, and, in particular, when they deal with a problem space that is not, and, in the current state of the art, /can/ not be well-defined, open public betas cannot be anything but insane.
Emily has said in the posting that initiates this thread that there will be a public beta. That will come when Graham, Emily, and the others on the Inform 7 team can be reasonably certain that the specs for the language and the library are complete, and that all of the essential ones and most of the detachable ones (by which I mean such hypothetical things as a fully worked-out rope module) work in the existing beta code, and that anything that doesn't work yet can be made to work in a reasonable timeframe.
I've been doing this stuff for 40 years, and I have a pretty good idea by now of what methodologies are an open invitation to disaster.
So let's stop acting like children on a bus.
-- John W. Kennedy "But now is a new thing which is very old-- that the rich make themselves richer and not poorer, which is the true Gospel, for the poor's sake." -- Charles Williams. "Judgement at Chelmsford"
I can't bring myself to reply to Jacek, especially not to agree with him. But, honestly, my immediate emotional reaction to this announcement was very negative. Whether there's any rational justification for it or not, I found Emily's (Graham's) post both bizarre and insulting at a gut level. I found myself hoping, as awful as it sounds, that people will boycott Inform 7 when it comes out.
This feeling is not new: it has been percolating in me every time discussion of Inform 7 comes up. I have a good idea as to why, but it's hard to articulate. It's the difference between a company that begins sentences with "In order to serve you better" and a company that makes changes that actually serve customers better. There needn't even be a difference in the actions of the two companies. The prefix "in order to serve you better" is already insulting, no matter what follows it.
The posts from the---dare I say it---Inform 7 cabal have had that character. It's not the lack of information that I object to, it's the attitude. All Andrew P. needs to say, in response to questions about release date, is that Graham hasn't told him anything, or that Graham doesn't want to commit to a date because he has other responsibilities and this is a hobby project. Those are forthright and reasonable answers. "Wait for an official announcement" is condescending and rude. (I'm not talking about Al, but about other people who've asked this kind of question in good faith.) Furthermore, the increased recursion depth and the decision to produce Blorb by default are things that I'd expect to be mentioned and discussed on RAIF well in advance of any working games being released. A lot of tools will have to be updated to support this. Were the tool authors secretly notified of this last year? Do people actually want Blorb metadata? Maybe they do, but the post creates the impression that Graham doesn't care one way or the other; he seems to expect that people will start using it simply because he's decided that that's what's best for them.
I'm writing this up because I can't help thinking that my reaction must have been shared by some other people here. Jacek of course has nothing but contempt for the whole community, and for Andrew and Emily in particular, so his reaction is predictable and his post has little content (in information-theoretic terms). I have a lot of respect for the community and for Andrew and Emily in particular, as I hope my other posts to this group have shown, and that's why I'm posting this. Maybe my feelings were illegitimate, but I felt them nonetheless.
Ben Rudiak-Gould wrote: > [...] Maybe they do, > but the post creates the impression that Graham doesn't care one way or the > other; he seems to expect that people will start using it simply because > he's decided that that's what's best for them.
No one is being forced to use Inform 7: has Graham decided what's best for those who decide to stick with Inform 6.x? Why does development on Inform need to be community-driven, anyway?
As for tools, which ones need to be updated? The games above already work on normal, everyday interpreters, albeit without making use of metadata.. Most people don't use IDEs for Inform. Interpreters and a compiler ... am I missing anything? (Probably.)
> I'm writing this up because I can't help thinking that my reaction must have > been shared by some other people here.
As someone who is as far from the Inform Cabal as a person could be while still being, perhaps technically, a part of the IF community, I'll say that I don't share your reaction. I cannot imagine what could be insulting about Emily's post, without the assumption that one should have a say in Inform development.
And as an aside: Please don't mention *him* in your posts, even to insult. It encourages him. He is not even a real person with real opinions, be them of contempt or not; he is a mere creation.
I frankly don't know what's going on here, (ive been away)..but what a dramatic moment. Indeed.
I have the mental picture of Emily in a black robe with hood fully adorned walking down a torched hallway, our view lateral of her sway, as she balances the book of Inform 7 upon a black pillow. Where she is heading, we do not know....
I can't speak for zarf, and I have been trying to avoid speaking for Graham (except, as here, forwarding text verbatim). A good deal of what I'm doing myself is preliminary testing, and writing source samples, large and small, to augment the documentation necessary for the public beta. This means that I *do* know just a little too much to claim total ignorance -- I could have made educated guesses about the answers to people's questions -- but they would be just that, educated guesses, not official announcements from Graham. Of course, people would tend in the course of human nature to regard these as promises, and be disappointed if they weren't met, and I do not want to commit Graham to anything behind his back. That seems pretty foul play. I also don't want to try to sketch out his personal motives, since those are presumably his business, and my telepathic powers are on the fritz this week anyway. If he wants to announce a release date, I'm sure he will, but in the meantime all I really *can* say, in honesty and fairness, is "you'll have to wait for Graham to answer that." It's not condescension; it's just not really having a better answer.
Personally, I'm intensely eager for the day when we can have a detailed discussion of what Inform 7 does, and how it compares with other systems. I'm sure the release won't produce a consensus, but I'm also certain that the conversation will be interesting; even now, it's hard for me to participate in theoretical discussions about where IF should go, because my discussion is influenced by things I can't draw in as examples, yet, and this is why a few times when pressed on things I have referred to it, mostly to say that I hope to take up (whatever conversation) again when we can consider more evidence together. At the same time, I7 is sufficiently novel that my trying to offer a partial list of "features" -- even if I did have Graham's permission to do so -- would give a pretty lopsided view of what it is and what it does.
All I can say is that it is such a tool as to make writing the two games I just released a light and pleasant task, the work of days or weeks rather than months. It took me weeks to straighten out the linking code in Savoir-Faire in Inform 6, and the result was full of bugs needing to be squashed, and hard to deal with every time I needed to add a new object to the scenario. Similar source text for Damnatio Memoriae was roughed out in a few hours, and was considerably more robust when finished. This is *not* because I'd already done it once.
Anyway, for my part, I'm sorry there is frustration. This should not be envisioned as a situation where I get the pretty toy and, for some inexplicable reason, everyone else doesn't; if anything, working on I7 has rather been a distraction from finishing the next large-scale IF of my own (though it also does provide the tools to do some things with that project that I otherwise couldn't). This is obviously my choice, but there it is. I'm doing my best to help get I7 to the point where a public beta would be a sensible event. At that point, the package can be seen together, and its features presented as a whole; while I realize just how irritating it is to be told to be patient, I can't offer much else. If it's any consolation (and I realize that you personally were not suggesting as much), I guarantee that the intervening time is not being taken up with a bunch of us sitting in a clubhouse drinking martinis and watching football.
About blorbing and alterations to spec, I wasn't a major party to that decision, but I do not believe these changes were undertaken in a vacuum either.
>> Ben Rudiak-Gould wrote: >> (About a general sense of distress, etc.)
>> I can't speak for zarf, and I have been trying to avoid speaking for >> Graham (except, as here, forwarding text verbatim). A good deal of what >> I'm doing myself is preliminary testing, and writing source samples, >> large and small, to augment the documentation necessary for the public
> [snip...]
> Thank you. I think that clears things up and will make folks feel a lot > better.
Nothing was really explained. We still don't know when, if ever, it's going to be released. Nor do we know the reason why Short used I7 for her Mystery House Project game. It looks like she's appropriated the thing for her own personal use. No wonder, considering this:
"All I can say is that it is such a tool as to make writing the two games I just released a light and pleasant task, the work of days or weeks rather than months. It took me weeks to straighten out the linking code in Savoir-Faire in Inform 6, and the result was full of bugs needing to be squashed, and hard to deal with every time I needed to add a new object to the scenario. Similar source text for Damnatio Memoriae was roughed out in a few hours, and was considerably more robust when finished. This is *not* because I'd already done it once."
What takes weeks in I6 takes only hours in I7. Will she be writing competition entries with I7 while the rest of us are clunking away on old rusty I6? Because that would be like entering a formula three race with a formula one car.
There are few enough of us in IF as it is, and while some of the comments in this thread may not have been intended as wounding to others, they would certainly read back that way to lurkers. A newsgroup which avoids flame-wars is such a fragile and precious thing, and RAIF when it works is a credit to the sense of community which IF has always fostered. Let's hang on to that. As my part in trying to understand each other better, let me acknowledge that even some of the - pardon me - rude and uncharitable things said above (about Emily, for instance) were nevertheless motivated by a wish for the community to be cohesive, and to work together. In that spirit, perhaps I may reply, in what I hope will be taken as a non-confrontational way.
Inform 7 is not finished yet. It is not a simple extension of Inform 6, and it turned out to be much harder to do than anticipated. After the first eighteen months or so of coding, I finally produced a kind of baseline system - one that was mostly capable of making viable IF. This build was christened 1A01. But not until 1J34 did I get to something which it was barely possible to show to other people - though it collapsed at the slightest provocation - and it was about another thousand builds before the system was able to cope with a full-sized test, a work in progress of Emily's. Even so, in some weeks I would get ten bug reports a day from only a couple of testers working at a time, which may give some idea of why I could not have coped with a larger testing team.
At that point, somewhere around build 2C80, we finally began to understand what we were doing: what the important concepts were that we were missing. The first wave of testing came to a close, and we went back to the drawing board, because we finally knew what to draw. This led to a substantial rewrite over the winter of 2004/5, and also the writing of a testing suite of code to verify the system somewhat better than before. (I really cannot describe how many hours Emily spent on this, and ironically the result is that her original work-in-progress game is now written in a language which no longer exists, so in a sense I am responsible for destroying a new work by Emily Short - though I have hopes that it may one day be rescued. Had earlier builds of I7 been circulated further, that fate might well have befallen others.) Around this time I wrote up a research paper on the work done so far, and setting out my increasingly firmly-held view that the question of what an IF design system should do is essentially a problem in the semantic analysis of language - indeed, while computer programming research has acknowledged syntactic linguistics for so long that the area is considered solved, I think semantics has too often been overlooked as a theory applicable to how people could most expressively use computers. At any rate work by Jackendoff, and others of his school, has had quite a large influence on I7 since then, and I think it was a wise decision to step backwards and think more carefully rather than release something workable but superficial. (I hope to publish the paper as part of the public beta. I'm still fixing references, and so on.)
I7 is now at build 3F40 and reaching completion - testing, documenting, looking for minor improvements, worrying over what we have missed, and so on. Many things need to be right all at once: the software, on its different platforms, the website, the documentation, the design, the examples (some 226 of these, which I have spent the last fortnight testing) - a to-do list of quite some size, and which new items keep dropping into. (Making the Mac OS X release a Universal Binary, for instance.) Many of these things involve concerted effort by several people - David Kinder and Andrew Hunter, for instance, who have put enormous amounts of time into the project. To those who say that I should have put out a public beta at the earliest possible moment - well, this is exactly what I intend to do.
Lastly, people routinely take three years to write a novel, or an academic monograph: shouldn't we expect a new system for IF be at least as substantial as that?
The sample games are not intended as clues, or as pointers to what we are doing. They could have been written in I6, or TADS. But it was fun writing them, so we thought others might have fun trying them out. In so far as we had another agenda, it was the one mentioned in the original posting (which Emily made on my behalf since I had newsreader trouble - stay silent for long enough and you lose the power of speech...). These games are samples of the story files output by I7. It is true that some modification will be needed for some interpreters to run I7 story files, and that at present few tools exist to manage blorbs: that is why I wanted to circulate some examples now, ahead of the public beta.
Why blorb? Well, blorb has been "officially recognised" by Inform since at least the DM4, and I think most people have always thought of it as a sensible idea, but at the same time it seemed an academic point - there were so few blorbs to interpret. (Then, too, it had not been sprinkled with the fairy dust of Infocom, being a format created entirely in the post-1990 age.) I've adopted blorb as the default output format for I7 for several reasons: (a) if one is going to have a wrapper for IF resources, this is much the best yet designed; (b) it is a format organised and documented by someone other than myself, which builds in some element of peer review; (c) it is flexible enough to be useful throughout the future lifetime of I7, as and when future releases build in new possibilities; (d) it provides an element of commonality as between Z-machine and glulx games.
But the main reason is that I would like I7 to draw in new writers, people who have not tried IF before, perhaps even people who have not played IF before. Let us see this from their point of view. Why shouldn't an interactive novel have a cover? Why shouldn't it be possible to write archiving programs, websites showcasing new releases, etc., which make use of bibliographic data and cover art to present IF as a lively, attractive and interesting world? I would point to iTunes as a vivid demonstration of the way that metadata can transform the experience of appreciating the breadth of culture (not just isolated tracks by isolated artists). By all means let us run IF on tiny handheld devices too: this isn't an either/or. But let us make the whole experience of looking at IF, from the point of view of newcomers, richer and more human.
I see that the cover art of these three sample games has already appeared out there on a blog. IF needs to engage with that vast, loose community of creative people who write blogs, and poems, and short stories, and unclassifiable but somehow artistic websites.
> All I can say is that it is such a tool as to make writing the two > games I just released a light and pleasant task, the work of days or > weeks rather than months. It took me weeks to straighten out the > linking code in Savoir-Faire in Inform 6, and the result was full of > bugs needing to be squashed, and hard to deal with every time I needed > to add a new object to the scenario. Similar source text for Damnatio > Memoriae was roughed out in a few hours, and was considerably more > robust when finished. This is *not* because I'd already done it once.
Emily, from your point of view (not Graham's), what about I7 in languages other than English? Support for library translation (like my italian INFIT) has been improved in some way?
> ... I wrote up a research paper on the work done so far, > and setting out my increasingly firmly-held view that the question of > what an IF design system should do is essentially a problem in the > semantic analysis of language - indeed, while computer programming > research has acknowledged syntactic linguistics for so long that the > area is considered solved, I think semantics has too often been > overlooked as a theory applicable to how people could most expressively > use computers.
This sounds very cool ... I'm all ready to launch into a discussion about semantic analysis and classifying things by concept instead of syntax ... it'll have to wait though, I guess (sigh).
Thanks for all the work you (and everybody else) are doing on Inform 7.
Simon Baldwin wrote: > Gblorb seemed able to extract the story file from these blorbs just > fine. I haven't had time to try any other blorb tools yet.
There's a little tool by Felix Grutzmacher called Rezrov that does the job very well also. http://ifarchive.flavorplex.com/if-archive/programming/blorb/rezrov.c. It's portable C code, and should be compilable virtually anywhere, but I can make a DOS/Windows executable available if anyone would like to use it but is not comfortable with compiling.
While I am quite excited about these games and can't wait to play them, I do think a bit more of an effort should be made to accomodate those who cannot or would just rather not use Windows Frotz 2002 or Zoom, at least while we are in this transitional phase and other terp maintainers have not yet made appropriate updates. One of Inform's biggest advantages is after all its portability to many different computing environments. Releasing the games in this format effectively negates a big chunk of that, at least among those who do not know how to de-Blorbify the files. It seems we are to some extent going against one of our community's most long-standing philosophies here.
-- Jimmy Maher Editor, SPAG Magazine -- http://www.sparkynet.com/spag Thank you for helping to keep text adventures alive!
jameshcunning...@gmail.com wrote: > As for tools, which ones need to be updated? The games above already > work > on normal, everyday interpreters, albeit without making use of > metadata.. Most > people don't use IDEs for Inform. Interpreters and a compiler ... am I > missing > anything? (Probably.)
txd and infodump, certainly.
-- John W. Kennedy "But now is a new thing which is very old-- that the rich make themselves richer and not poorer, which is the true Gospel, for the poor's sake." -- Charles Williams. "Judgement at Chelmsford"
> Around this time I wrote up a research paper on the work done so far, > and setting out my increasingly firmly-held view that the question of > what an IF design system should do is essentially a problem in the > semantic analysis of language - indeed, while computer programming > research has acknowledged syntactic linguistics for so long that the > area is considered solved, I think semantics has too often been > overlooked as a theory applicable to how people could most expressively > use computers. At any rate work by Jackendoff, and others of his > school, has had quite a large influence on I7 since then, and I think > it was a wise decision to step backwards and think more carefully > rather than release something workable but superficial. (I hope to > publish the paper as part of the public beta. I'm still fixing > references, and so on.)
Last year I've started studying some semantic analisys for my work on INFIT. How your work on I7 apply to languages other than english? What about library translation?
> Lastly, people routinely take three years to write a novel, or an > academic monograph: shouldn't we expect a new system for IF be at least > as substantial as that?
