Inform 7 gets a makeover, formulas abound and users get more open

Inform 7 has undergone some rather interesting changes. The site has now changed to Inform7.com, the systems language has been updated to include equations and many more niceties, but more importantly, Aaron Reed’s screencast introduces new users to the system.

Finally, there is a section on the site for educators. This will bring Inform 7 users a lot of flexibility. Things learnt in the classroom can aid in future design, giving educators chance to give input to the system by proxy at least.

The website is a superb improvement and well worth a look.

Blue Lacuna is now out of beta

Aaron’s game, Blue Lacuna, is now completed and out of beta. This game has to be one of the largest works of IF to date, if not the largest. At an incredible 5 MB for the glulxe story, 385000 words of I7 source text, 250000 words of prose, this work sets the standard and truly tests the Inform 7 development system.

As a tester for the work, Aaron has demonstrated his commitment to quality control and overall accessibility. It is highly recommended. The work, plus links to relevant interpreters can be downloaded from here.

Note, according to Aaron, Zoom isn’t recommended, however I did test under it and it’s fully workable for blind players. For the first move, type “screenreader”, omitting the quotation marks of course. This will improve accessibility by listing keywords and relevant conversation topics under the prose.

Zoom gets updated to version 1.1.3

for those who are not keeping track via the newsgroups, andrew Hunter has updated Zoom to version 1.1.3. It’s a bug fix release and is recommended for all users.

Congratulations for the IF Comp winners

I want to take time to congratulate the winners of the IF comp. The results are in and Violet came first. Nightfall and Everybody dies were the runners up. Well done to them.

The 14th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition is now underway.

A quick alert to let folks know that the games for the 14th IFComp are ready for download at this link.

General Inform 7 updates

A few extensions have now been updated to work under 5U92. They can of course be downloaded from the official I7 extensions page.

Finally, the syntax document has also been updated and it can be directly downloaded from here.

Inform Build 5U92 Is now available

The latest build of Inform 7 is now up. The main changes are technical in nature, mostly to do with internal reforms related to the compiler. some improvements have been made to how definitions are created, “rather than” is now possible so it is much easier to code them. For instance (taken from the change log):
Definition: a number is even rather than odd if the remainder after dividing it by 2 is 0.

Finally, scenes can be given properties and they can be tested for. As a release, it’s not hugely improved, but many bugs have been fixed pertaining to rule-book management and compiler optimisation. For those people who experienced speed issues compiling under 5T18, these have been fixed.

As usual, it can be downloaded from the usual site.

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.