It’s that time again, IF Comp time. The entries this year seem varied enough, plenty of Inform entries which is always good. The main page is the place to download the games.
Happy Playing.
October 2, 2009
January 29, 2009
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.
November 17, 2008
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.
October 1, 2008
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.
June 19, 2008
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.
June 3, 2008
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.
May 9, 2008
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.
April 30, 2008
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.
December 19, 2007
Some thoughts on “Spatterlight”
I understand that many blind Macintosh users seem to think that “Spatterlight” is ideal for playing IF. Here are my own thoughts on why they think that this is so and my own personal viewpoints:
1. All the action takes place in a single window. This is true but there are serious drawbacks to this approach. The main one being that for me, at least, it has been impossible to access the status line with Voiceover. Zoom passes with flying colours here as it’s implementation is rather more sophisticated.
2. It plays more formats. So? I’d rather have access to modern IF formats anyway, who cares about “level 9″ there not even in business and as to AGT games, how many are written now?
3. It is easy to use. A good point but I’d rather have complete access to the game environment, not to mention that some games that make use of more aesthetic Glulxe effects such as multiple windows (City of secrets), conversations systems using the status line for menu choices (Best of Three) etc. can’t be played. Any games using sound or images are out as well because Spatterlight only supports the basic GLK implementation.
Finally, from what I have noticed, it’s not even being worked on any longer. Personally, I’d only use it to play AGT games and those that Zoom doesn’t support at present. Zoom has a more advanced game management system, not to mention it’s plug-in architecture for adding additional interpreters when they become available. One final bonus. Zoom’s integration with IFDB makes it far easier to find other games that you might enjoy.
