Inform 7

[catventure]

For those interested in interactive fiction/text adventure design you can find info and download the latest free version 7 of INFORM which now use a new 'natural language' type of english

http://inform-fiction.org/I7/Inform%207.html

Regards,
catventure

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi Catventure,

thanks for the tip! I downloaded the program, and after some testing I must say that TAB suits me better ;)
Although the idea of "natural language" is very nice, it can be very hard to not get lost in bigger projects.

Also, I'v tried to create sample game using example from the documentation, and when I returned to start location from the second one, it displayed only the name of location, not the description. This may be "feature", but I don't like it too much.

On other side, for people with no programming experience it could be easy way to create interactive fiction.
But for better organizing of data I still prefer TAB :). It is more clear where Locations, Characters, ... are.
When the Richedit update will come, TAB games will also have the clean and rich look of Inform.
Hmm, I can't wait for new TAB 8)


Petr

[Edit: I edited the original version, because it could be understood in bad way by accident. I have still a lot of work on my English :) ]

[catventure]

Hi Petr,

Thanks for your observations. Even though INFORM uses a form of 'natural english language' there are still writing and syntax rules to be learnt before you can begin writing/coding a game...
TAB may not be as powerful, fast or flexible in some ways as INFORM or TADS, HUGO and others but I am trying to make it easy to use to create an adventure. There are many things in INFORM which TAB can do just as easily, albeit in a different format - the end result is pretty much the same in most cases. Eventually I will expand the Help File and make a tutorial and add more demo examples.
With the addition of RTF color and formatting effects the text output can be more varied to suit certain scenarios...

Thanks,
catventure

[RobertoBianchi]

Hi Catventure,

I'm not able to figure out what exactly means natural english language'?

Ciao,
Roberto

[catventure]

Hi Roberto,



I'm not able to figure out what exactly means natural english language


'natural english language' is just the name of the coding language that the makers of Inform have designed for writing interactive fiction using 'english-like words and statements'

Here is a quote from the Inform manual



Does Inform really understand English?


No. No computer does, and Inform does not even try to read the whole wide range of text: it is a practical tool for a particular purpose, and it deals only with certain forms of sentence useful to that purpose. Inform source text may look like "natural language", the language we find natural among ourselves, but in the end it is a computer programming language. Many things which seem reasonable to the human reader are not understood by Inform. For instance, Inform understands


something which is carried by the player


but not (at present, anyway)


something which the player carries


even though both are perfectly good English. So it is not always safe to assume that Inform will understand any reasonable instruction it is given: when in doubt, we must go back to the manual.


It's supposed to be a friendlier type of script language for making text adventures.

Regards,
catventure.

[RobertoBianchi]

Thanks Catventure,

I have understood now that although the programming languages using English word for keywords, statements, functions and so on, they aren't natural language for English speaking people.
I am interesting to natural language (for programming purpose of course), indeed at ThinBasic we take care to support natural language (where until now natural language = speaking language) even if in a simple way with ALIAS, into the script (i.e. for teaching use in elementary school).
So I'll take a closest look to Inform.

Regards,
Roberto