Inform 7 Public Beta

[Erkki]

I don't know much about authoring interactive fiction but this seems amazing:

http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7/Welcome.html

You write something like this:

"Buttons" by William Wonka

The Confectionary Workshop is a room. The Chocolate

Machine is here. "The Chocolate Machine has pride of

place. A lever and two buttons, one white, the other

brown, seem to be the only controls. On top is a

hopper."

A container called the hopper is part of the Chocolate

Machine. The lever, the white button and the brown

button are parts of the Chocolate Machine.

The Chocolatier's desk is here. "The Chocolatier

evidently works at the imposing green-leather topped

desk facing the Machine. It has three drawers with brass

handles."

The upper drawer, the middle drawer and the lower drawer

are parts of the desk. The upper drawer, the middle

drawer and the lower drawer are openable closed

containers. In the middle drawer is a sugared almond. In

the lower drawer is a Battenburg cake. On the desk is a

liquorice twist.

, press the "Go!" button and the application instantly translates it into a game that has all those things mentioned and that can be played right away. You can even make changes and press the "replay" button to replay the game with the changes taken into account.

The announcement in a newsgroup: http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.int-fiction/browse_thread/thread/f5919cf1b49badac/17791dfefeec46e0#17791dfefeec46e0

[loonyboi]

Maybe I'm too much of a nerd, but when I wrote IF Quake I did it all by hand using BBEdit. I tried using some of the suites, and found them too confusing. Also they're kinda limiting. I wanted to do all kinds of tricks to make it seem like it was emulating the Quake engine, and couldn't figure out how to do delayed output (to simulate the console) using any of the suites.

[Erkki]

Also, this seems good for small examples, but I doubt making a lengthy game is very easy with this. The natural language will probably get in the way and having more formal structure would be preferable.

But I think this could be a great way to start learning the basics of making IF games. At least I'm somewhat tempted to start doing that

Note: also, when Zerobot is done (someday), you'll be able to play games made with this on these here forums since it compiles into Z-code