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.
June 3, 2008
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.
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.
May 1, 2008
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.
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.
March 8, 2008
“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.
December 29, 2007
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.
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.
December 3, 2007
Inform 7 Build 5j39 is now available
The latest build of Inform, Build 5J39 is now up on the official site. It adds the ability to declare lists and use constructs for searching, moving entries around, adding them, removing them, etc….., etc. Some new examples demonstrate using lists to simulate arrays, stacks, logs and queues. Two of the most notable examples in this build, Robo 1 and Robo 2 respectively, demonstrate using lists to crate a robot that learns behaviours and plays them back on demand. There is plenty to get your teeth into in this build, plus all the known bugs from 5G67 are now fixed.
