News about Inform 7

After a hiatus of some months (sorry about that), the extensions page has once again been updated, and is under new management. To submit new materials to the volunteers maintaining the site, please send your extensions to i7extensions@smallwhitehouse.org.

Andy Brooks uses Inform 7 as a game engine for an introductory games programming course at an Icelandic university.

Brooks writes:

I teach about the standard IF puzzle types (door puzzles, light source puzzles, vehicle puzzles, time puzzles, and puzzles involving NPCs) and then get the students to tackle a big assignment to create their own IF game. They then playtest each others´ games to learn about that side of game development.

(I guess roughly 60% of the module is on this.)

The relevant syllabus, complete with Inform examples, may be found here.

Jimmy Maher announces a significant upgrade to Filfre, an interpreter for playing z-code and Glulx games on Windows. The newest release includes a number of bug-fixes and implements accelerated opcodes to play complex Glulx games more quickly.

Ben Cressey announces the latest update of Gargoyle, an interpreter front end for Windows and Linux, with attractive font rendering capable of running z-code and Glulx games as well as games for other IF virtual machines. Downloads are available here and changes are logged here.

Jeff Nyman has released a new tutorial on creating location descriptions in Inform. His explanation is based on his work with authors who may be interested in writing something other than the traditional game.

Jimmy Maher today announced the release of his long-in-progress “The King of Shreds and Patches,” a Lovecraftian story set in Shakespeare’s London.

Also notable is the recent release of Textfyre’s first game, “Jack Toresal and the Secret Letter,” designed and written by Mike Gentry. “Jack Toresal” is a work of commercial IF, but a demo can be played for free online.

Mario Donick writes:

Attached is a small (222 KB) research paper written by me, one of my co-workers at Rostock University and one of my students. Its title is:

“Goethe’s ‘Elective Affinities’ as E-Learning. Developing Exercises for German Classes in the Secondary School Level 2″

The system described in this paper is basically IF and currently in development, using Inform 7 with the German extension (which is developed by Christian Bluemke).

…The paper has been presented today at the e-Learning Baltics 2009 conference and it is published in the conference proceedings (pp. 17–26).

Jim Aikin reports that version 1.00 of his The Inform 7 Handbook is now available.

Courtesy of Andrew Hunter:

The Mac OS X interpreter Zoom 1.1.4 has been released.

This is primarily a maintenance release, with various bugfixes accumulated over the last year and updates to the interpreters. It has one major new feature: you can now choose which Glulx interpreter to use in the preferences - either the faster git or the reference glulxe.

Build 5Z71 of Inform is now out for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and Arch, plus command-line support for generic Linux and the XO laptop), with Solaris builds due to follow shortly.