A note on Emily’s “Property Checking” Extension

Just wanted to alert people to the fact that Emily Short’s “Property Checking Extension” for Inform 7 doesn’t quite work as intended. It tells you that rooms have no initial appearance when it should be checking for an initial room description. She has been alerted to this and will fix it in a future update.

Inform7 or TADS 3

One of the questions that many newcomers to writing IF seem to ask is “which system is better? Inform 6/7, TADS, Hugo or some other”? This question is rather difficult to answer, but I will put forward my own views on each of the major systems. My experience with IF systems is predominantly with Inform 7, so read this entry with that in mind, but let it be known that I am interested in anyone’s comments on the merits of each system. Also, I only really know about the differences between TADS and Inform, so it is these systems I will attempt to contrast.

Replaying an old favourite

I recently played through Suzanne Britain’s “Worlds Apart” again. My first experience with this game was during my first year at the university of Hertfordshire. It left somewhat of an impression on me at that time, but playing through it again, it seems less interesting. This isn’t to say it is badly written or anything like that, I suspect it is to do with my greater understanding of IF design in general, but most likely due to the fact that I have done the fantasy genera to death. There is only so much “His Dark Materials” one can take. WA does kind of fall into this category, but it is even more driven by mood setting. It is prose heavy, so those who are wanting a light time of it should not play this game.

It’s saving grace however, is the fact that the puzzles are relatively easy. There is the odd “guess the verb” and “guess what the author is thinking” puzzle but on the hole it isn’t mind-blowingly difficult to play through. There are adaptive hints that do work well. It was written in TADS 2 so there are not as many niceties with the conversation system, but Britain has actually fleshed her NPC’s out rather well considering.

Highly recommended for those who like well written prose.

An Accessibility hint for blind Zoom users

For those users who are relying on VoiceOver to access zoom, a useful thing to try is to disable cursor tracking with Control, Option, Shift F3.
This will allow you to keep the cursor where it is without having to constantly scroll up to find your last output from the interpreter. Sometimes this messes up and jumps you right back to the top, but more often than not, it works. In the version of Zoom that Andrew sent me though, some of the text editing commands seem to conflict with his new speak previous move commands. Perhaps he could allow you to set up shortcut keys for these options? In all fairness, the speak previous move commands aren’t as useful as they once were because of this new trick with disabling cursor tracking, but they are sometimes helpful, especially if you want to use the direct TTS functions built into Zoom rather than voiceover’s own speech.

Zoom accessibility and VoiceOver

After some discussion with Andrew Hunter, he has sent me a new version of Zoom to try. I will let you know my findings. One of the nice functions he has added is the ability to speak previous moves. He is willing to work with me on making it the most accessible interpreter for adventure games yet and I do admire his commitment. Zoom is destined to be the best at what it does because it supports plugin architectures so that one can write runners for all sorts of new adventure game systems if, and when they become available.

I will keep you informed on his progress with this.