Entries Tagged 'New Releases' ↓

…is now available for Mac, with builds for other platforms to follow.

The chief change of note is the extensive revision to the World Index. Mapping is now considerably more robust and offers more authorial control over presentation; several Uservoice requests about indexing were fulfilled at the same time.

A fuller description (with pictures!) is available here.

Other minor changes may be found in the change log.

Inform 6F95 is now available for the Mac, with other builds to follow.

This maintenance release fixes every core Inform issue logged on the Inform bug tracker up to today, which means that it resolves around 180 issues; this change log lists most of them, but omits a few which were simple corrections of typos, and of course doesn’t list the small number of issues closed as being misunderstandings. Though there are no significant new features, two additional resources have been added to the core Inform distribution: Andrew Plotkin’s Quixe interpreter, allowing Glulx story files to be released as playable websites (something up to now allowed only for Z-machine story files); and Eric Eve’s extension “Epistemology”, which joins the built-in set for the first time.

6E72 for Windows and Linux CLI are now available from the download page.

Unfortunately, there appears to be an issue in the IDE under pre-10.6 versions of the Mac OS, such that Inform refuses to run the compiled game in the IDE or to release it properly. This appears to be intermittent and has a workaround (closing a newly-made project and opening it again) under 10.5; in one case on a PPC for 10.4, the workaround does not work.

For more background on this issue, see these Mantis reports: 1 2. When an updated version of the Mac OS IDE becomes available, we will announce the replacement here.

The Mac OS X version of Inform release 6E72 is now available, to be followed by versions for other platforms. This version offers no new features, but fixes a number of bugs from the 6E59 release that were deemed critical or serious. (Some bugs considered mild or cosmetic remain.)

The change log lists the bugs fixed, and more detail about them can be found at the bug tracking site.

One substantial change to Inform release 6E59 is the improvement to the Phrasebook tab of the index. The new version has been substantially redesigned so that each phrase expands to a detailed description of syntax, linked to an equivalent portion of the manual.

This is a partial attempt to address the ongoing desire for better reference documentation in Inform 7.

For the time being, we have not updated the plain text “syntax document” that accompanies Inform to account for the syntax of 6E59. One reason for that is time — it would need some hours of work to be brought in line with the new build, and the document maintainer is over-extended — but the other reason is that we are hoping to discover whether the Phrasebook can usefully take over some of the work that the syntax document has done in the past. Obviously, it won’t handle everything — the syntax document addresses assertions as well as phrases, and assertion formats are not discussed in the Phrasebook. On the other hand, the Phrasebook is automatically generated, reliably thorough, and directly linked into the documentation — features the syntax document can’t copy. So we are hoping to move towards improving Inform’s indexing and documentation, rather than continuing to produce syntax documents indefinitely.

Suggestions concerning this — the usefulness of the Phrasebook, and any other elements that might be needed — can helpfully go on the uservoice forum.

The change log mentions very briefly:

Up to now, every scene has had a “when S begins” and “when S ends” rulebook,
but there has been no way to express rules generalising about scenes. We
can now write, e.g.:

A scene can be bright or dim. A scene is usually dim. Dawn is a bright scene.

When a scene which is bright ends: say “So passes the bright [scene being changed].”

When a recurring scene begins: say “Groundhog Day!”

In addition, text defined in quotes after a scene definition becomes part of the scene description, and is printed automatically when the scene begins.

The new example Entrevaux shows how these features might be used for a scene-centric rather than location-centric kind of programming.

The new build discourages the use of several old phrases; of these, perhaps the most common is the set “end the game in victory”, “end the game in death”, and “end the game saying…”. Almost every project will have contained at least one of these phrases.

Instead, Inform now prefers

end the story
end the story finally
end the story saying (text)
end the story finally saying (text)

There are two reasons behind this change.

One is to move away from the terminology of “game”: not everything produced by Inform these days is a game.

The other is to deal with an inconsistency in the old system. The previous phrasing structure meant “end the game saying ‘…’” could only be used to describe what Inform thought of as “losing” endings. This corresponds to a structure from Inform 6, where there could be only one victory message, but any number of exotic death messages.

The distinction between winning and losing has been replaced by a distinction between “final” and “non-final” endings. This makes a difference only to what is printed by the “Table of Final Question Options”: it is possible to specify some options to be printed only if we have reached a final ending — for instance if there is spoilery information we would like to show the player only after we know he has seen everything the story has to offer.

For more about the options at the end of the story, see the Recipe Book on Out of World Actions and Effects > Ending the story.

The issue that had been causing a Code 10 error for some large Windows projects has now been resolved. If you are encountering this problem, please redownload and install Windows from the downloads page.

The fixed build has no other changes and is otherwise still in line with the Mac and Linux builds.

As several people have discovered, release 6E59 produces a Code 10 compilation error on some (not all) large Windows (not Mac, and not to the best of our knowledge Linux) projects. Particularly vulnerable are builds with large numbers of duplicate objects.

As this is a mission-critical issue, a replacement build will likely be posted as soon as reasonably possible after the bug is found and dealt with. Those interested in tracking progress on the bug, or able to contribute more information, may find the details here.

This is not related to the problem that the original upload of 6E59 failed on pre-Intel Macs due to a lack of universal binary tools. That issue has already been resolved and a new version posted, so if you are encountering that issue, you may fix it by re-downloading 6E59 for the Mac. The new version has not received a change of build number because there was no change to the core functionality of Inform, only to the format of the included tools.