the new release of Inform 7 is now available. It has quite a lot of re-worked examples and many interesting changes. The most interesting, to me at least, being the ability to read and write tables and other text to, and from, external files. This opens up a lot of possibilities. The system will also substitute back in as well, making management of large collections of text a real treat. Limitations of the Z Machine can in theory be overlooked as one can do the relevant textual work and parse back in as necessary, not to mention the usefulness of this kind of ability within the management of large tables. Imagine using it, for instance, to code all your rlational tables into different files, have the game automatically parse them, read in there respective values and substitute text as if they were already compiled into the ZCode story file. Another facet of this is the fact that John Ingolds text variations is now included as standard. Factor this in with the above. You can just ghasp at the possibilities.
Another nice feature is the ability to execute external programs and files from within a compiled story file. One of the examples wich is MacOs only runs a unix script in the background to capture RSS feeds and includes them as headlines within the example. Marvelous stuff.
To date, this has to be one of the most significant builds of the system in a long time. you can of course download it from the official site at
