For those using VoiceOver and Zoom

I have already discussed good solutions for those wanting to read the screens of Zoom with VO, rather than the TTS built in to the program. The difficulty is that in some situations, and I can’t put my finger on how to reproduce this, VO decides to crash and speech is lost entirely. After consulting with Andrew on this, it seems that VoiceOver has difficulties navigating in a long stream of text.

to get around the problem, go into Zoom’s preferences, Select General, then move the amount of scrollback to retain slider to something low like 25 per cent. This seems to have solved the issue for now.

The only thing to be aware of is that once the buffer for scrollback is full, VO will zip you to the top of the screen if using the strategies already mentioned here. There isn’t an easy workaround for this at present. the best thing to do is navigate to the bottom of the screen with VO Shift End, work up to the room name/text of your previous command and read back down. VO can get stuck sometimes, so the best thing to do is move left one character and then up again. This is a known issue and will be looked into for the future.

Spatterlight gets an update

Tor Andersson’s Spatterlight, the multi-format IF player has now been updated to version 0.5.0. Changes in this release improve the interpreters used. The Glulxe interpreter has been updated to the latest specification, as have the Alan and Adrift ones. It can of course be downloaded from it’s official site.

A note to those using VoiceOver, games that rely on the status line for contextual information are unusable as VO refuses to see that area of the screen. It is suggested that blind user’s wishing to play games that rely on feedback via the status line use Zoom at this time.

Planet Interactive Fiction has a new address

A quick post to alert those using “Planet Interactive Fiction”, the IF blog/RSS aggregation service. It’s address has changed to a more memorable URL. It can be found now at this address.

ifarchive.org gets significant improvements

The Interactive Fiction Archive has been given significantly more bandwidth, thus giving us faster download speeds. It’s had some majour restructuring to disallow robots and other internet crawlers. All these improvements amount to a better quality of service throughout all the mirrors as well.

Significant Inform 7 extension updates

A note to let people know that many of the Inform 7 extensions have been updated to run under 5T18. As usual, they can be downloaded at the official extensions page.

Inform build 5T18 is now available

The latest build of Inform is now up. The main changes are related to understanding plurals and defining grammar in general, but many more things have altered and been reworked. The python style use of tab stops for IF/then/else conditionals is now implemented, but the older syntax for these conditions will continue to be supported indefinitely.

It is available from The official site.

Are IF bloggers on a different planet?

It would seem so, as a really new and potentially great site has been launched. Christopher Armstrong’s Planet interactive fiction has been devised to “keep” us all hopefully on one planet. The idea is that our blog postings are shown on one page. No more messing with bookmarking everyone’s blog, all new postings to blogs are there an hour after being written. This is possibly one of the biggest things to happen to the IF community in quite some time, and I am sure it will generate a lot of discussion as well.

Happy Birthday to Inform 7

Who would have believed that 2 years ago this very day, Inform 7 was released? I was away when the actual announcement was made regarding the new system but I have never looked back since downloading one of the early builds in July of that year. It is a remarkable effort of community input and Doctors Nelson and Short really are luminaries in our community and want applauding for there efforts.

“Deluxe Doors” extension

Emily short has posted a rather useful I7 extension on the official site. It is meant to aid in designing doors with latches. One useful ability of this extension is to allow you to have say a knocker on one side and a latch on the other.

You can of course get it from the Inform 7 Extensions page.

I7 Extensions updated

Emily short has now fixed the bugs in her “Property Checking” extension and updated her “locksmith” one. The reason for the update to “locksmith” is because of her latest offering, “Approaches”. This extension is superb. It allows you to do custom text generation for moving between rooms, not to mention adding in a handy go to location option for visited rooms. The rules included in the extension are easy to hook into as well. Highly recommended.

As usual, these extensions can be downloaded from the I7 extensions page.