Inform 7, the long-awaited ground-up rewrite of the interactive fiction authoring language, is out in beta release, and it’s… extraordinary. First the bad news: they’ve tied it inextricably into an IDE currently only available for Windows and OSX. On the other hand, that IDE looks pretty damn fantastic — packed chock-full of IF-specific goodies like a replay mechanism (including branches) that lets you adjust the source then effortlessly return to your playthrough. On the gripping hand, the language has been totally rewritten — and the only way I’ll know what I think about that is by trying it out.
Here are the samples from the site (which are presumably chosen to be impressive… and they are):
- Martha is a woman in the Vineyard.
- The cask is either customs sealed, liable to tax or stolen goods.
- The prevailing wind is a direction that varies.
- The Old Ice House overlooks the Garden.
- A container is bursting if the total weight of things in it is greater than its breaking strain.
Those aren’t the output the player sees, those are statements the author uses. Programming language statements. That’s compiler input.
The programmer in me is terrified that I’ll want to do something that this won’t let me. The would-be IF author is going “wheeeee!”
… And, “%&$@#, I wonder if it will run under WINE.”
Update: Nope, at least I couldn’t make it go and nobody online has come forward either. But, oh wow oh wow oh wow: check out this machinery for “scenes” (used here as event-triggered plot developements): “Entrapment” example, “The Prague Job” example.
5 Comments
There is a sort-of way to sort-of run it under WINE if you don’t mind nasty evil hackery. No nice spiffy IDE, but the command line compiler ni.exe runs just about well enough to create valid Inform 6 source files.
See here: I7 on Linux: Nasty evil hackery (posted in rec.arts.int-fiction.)
Thanks Grim, I indeed followed those instructions and got the compiler working. (For others: you’ll also need to provide a VerbLib.h (included is Verblib.h, lcase L), a symlink works fine.)
Oooh, and the Inform 7 forum Grim links to looks worth checking out too.
Oh wow, this is incredible. I’ve had a play with it, and the impressiveness appears to go way under the skin. Have you seen the the SPAG interview with Graham Nelson and Emily Short? It bodes well that Emily feels that I7 gives her powers that she didn’t have before (extreme paraphrasing).
It’s a shame the full IDE hasn’t been made to work on Linux yet, because it’s really very nice. (I knew there had to be a reason for my recent Mac purchase…) The skeins and the ‘map’ representation of the built world promise to be most useful.
Mr de Jager, aren’t you up for the conversion task? For porting to Qt or GTK? Hmm, hmm? ;^)
Isn’t it just gorgeous? I’m ashamed to say, since my initial spurt of enthusiasm I haven’t had time to look at it again. (That would be a ‘no’, thus, for porting, alas.)
I wasn’t so excited about the ‘map’ stuff (handy for sanity checks, not so good for release if you ask me) but the skein is bloody marvellous.
There was a partial Linux port under developement, but I’ve less than no idea how far it got. I believe people were using it successfully (running the compiler under wine but the GUI natively) but I don’t know which features got implemented in the end. Try http://thewhitelion.org/inform7 (although it seems to be down at the moment).