Latest news on the next I7 update

[Jim_Aikin]

A couple of people asked me today if I was planning to update the Inform Handbook. If I do it, I’ll probably want to wait until the next release of I7. So the question naturally bubbles to the surface: Is such a release imminent? Semi-imminent? Adrift in the Sargasso Sea?

I’m aware, of course, that the development team tends to be rather reticent about divulging details. But it has been 15 months now, so I think maybe asking the question is not completely out of line…

Emily answered below:

@emshort

So to answer this in vague and general terms that I hope will still be somewhat helpful:

No, we don’t have a release date, for the same reasons as usual: not wanting to mislead people, not being sure what our own schedules will allow.

Graham has been working on Inform recently, but before that there was a hiatus of some months because of an increased workload at work and some other things of a like nature. I have also been extremely busy (as it happens, I think what I’ve been doing may eventually interest some IF fans, but it has involved building up a product and company, then selling the company and transitioning jobs, so I haven’t had much leftover time to call my own).

That said, the new build, when it comes, will be a more significant departure than most people have seen in a while, because it finally puts through a number of syntax deprecations we’ve been trailing; completely reforms the library message system; and does a few other major changes that we felt would be best to do all at once. The size and complexity of the update is another reason why it is taking such a long time.

To the extent possible, we’re trying to have our busy-ness at least not drag down progress on decoupled but related projects; Vorple is going forward, and I have given a volunteer the go-ahead to work on the things that still need work on Threaded Conversation, and so on.

[emshort]

So to answer this in vague and general terms that I hope will still be somewhat helpful:

No, we don’t have a release date, for the same reasons as usual: not wanting to mislead people, not being sure what our own schedules will allow.

Graham has been working on Inform recently, but before that there was a hiatus of some months because of an increased workload at work and some other things of a like nature. I have also been extremely busy (as it happens, I think what I’ve been doing may eventually interest some IF fans, but it has involved building up a product and company, then selling the company and transitioning jobs, so I haven’t had much leftover time to call my own).

That said, the new build, when it comes, will be a more significant departure than most people have seen in a while, because it finally puts through a number of syntax deprecations we’ve been trailing; completely reforms the library message system; and does a few other major changes that we felt would be best to do all at once. The size and complexity of the update is another reason why it is taking such a long time.

To the extent possible, we’re trying to have our busy-ness at least not drag down progress on decoupled but related projects; Vorple is going forward, and I have given a volunteer the go-ahead to work on the things that still need work on Threaded Conversation, and so on.

[emshort]

It is very unlikely that there will be a “maintenance” release before the next big release. The next big release does require a bunch of additional cleanup and documentation and so on; it is taking a long time because Graham and I both have very little bandwidth available at the moment.

(And no: Inform is not developed in an agile fashion, and likely never will be. I encourage those for whom that is a priority to turn their attention to one of the many cool projects that are run in that fashion. It sounds as though Alex is nominating his, for instance.)

[ChrisC (Chris Conley)]

@Alex

no way of tracking progress or contributing

@Jim Aikin

I’m pretty sure it is in active development … but (a) how would we know,

Well, besides the above list, in case someone wants more official venues to follow progress of and provide feedback regarding Inform 7:

• I7’s Mantis bug tracker, for reporting bugs and following the status of all known bugs (releases have tended to close all open bug reports, so look for the number of not-closed-or-resolved bugs to approach 0 as an indicator of imminent release)
• The I7 Uservoice, to suggest and vote on new features, and read dev comments and interest/likelihood of implementing them

[emshort]

There was a bit of a pause due to real life busy-ness (mine and Graham’s both), but it is under active development and in fact I am sorting through uservoice a bit right now.

[zarf (Andrew Plotkin)]

Update from Graham: April 28th Has Been Postponed

Today is Inform’s twentieth birthday: the first releases of the compiler Inform 1 and the game Curses were both made on 28 April 1993, at the end of an Easter vacation in Oxford when I should have been writing my thesis. In computing terms, that now seems a primeval age. Inform was announced by Usenet posts: the first websites outside CERN had appeared only four months earlier, and the notion hadn’t yet caught on. (Usenet posts were briefly having trouble percolating out from the University of Oxford, which is why Wikipedia records a first release date in early May.) Inform was written on an Acorn Archimedes computer with no network access and a 20MB hard disc, smaller than the current Mac OS X download size. Most of Inform’s users had Commodore Amigas, or ran OS/2 on IBM PCs; the Apple IIe Platinum was still being manufactured, but was too small. Linus Torvalds had a two-year head start on me, which is no doubt why his software has become more famous than mine, but even so, the word “Linux” was still hardly known. A typical large work of IF took ten minutes to compile into a 128KB story file, but even so it seemed miraculous to be able to do this on a home computer - we really did use the term “home computer”.

Well, enough of that. Long-time users will know that it’s customary to make major releases on Inform’s birthday. Inform 6 appeared on 28 April 1996, on the third birthday, and Inform 7 exactly ten years later, on the thirteenth. For those wondering if Hari Seldon will be appearing from the vault once again this year, I’m afraid I have to report that the crisis is not yet upon us. However, we are fairly close: that is, there will shortly be a new build of Inform which develops the language in several substantial ways. I intend to fix a number of issues reported to the bug tracker, and to work further on Vorple integration, before we’ll be done. The new build is otherwise feature-complete, as they say, and includes adaptive text (with flexible person and tense), a new system of responses making it easy to change what we used to call “library messages”, the unification of “indexed text” and “text” into a single kind just called “text”, full floating-point arithmetic, better linguistics, a redesigned Index, in-app documentation incorporating Zarf’s indexes, and so on. More than thirty suggestions from the Uservoice forum have been acted on, so there are also a few small things to like. The changes under the hood are quite substantial, with many internals having been rewritten to facilitate translation into non-English natural languages.

So Inform enters its third decade still alive and kicking, even if April 28th will be a little late this year. I would like to thank all in the community who have helped it along, from its earliest days to the present.

Graham Nelson
28 April 2013

[Dannii]

News from the Oxford Tools Meetup:

Graham Nelson showed us features of the upcoming build of Inform, with the target release date of April 30, 2014. These include:

• indexed text is no longer a different type from text, which means that anything that can be done with indexed text (the manipulation of regular expressions, etc.) can now be done with any text property in a game
• floating point numbers are now handled natively in Inform
• Inform now does global named constants, and has a sleeker way of defining global variables
• Inform is able to put the story into various tenses and persons, so it is possible to change the story text output to, say, third person plural past tense, if you wish (and to change this during play); this was previously possible only with custom library message extensions
• Inform now provides richer facilities for doing adaptive text in general so that extensions can also easily be written to change their tense and person
• Inform has built-in algorithms for conjugating English verbs to help produce adaptive text smoothly
• A new “responses” system provides a way to override any library message text or any message from a properly formatted extension, without having to replace the entire rules in which the text appears
• The first groundwork has been done towards creating international versions of Inform, including some experiments with French verb formation; this does not constitute a total translation of Inform so far, but is necessary preparation with a view towards eventually translating the whole system
• The supporting materials have been extensively revised, the index panel improved, and a full index for the documentation provided
• There is now a panel in the IDE for Extensions, including an App Store-like system called the Public Library for downloading them from the Inform website. This panel allows the author to view which extensions are installed and which are in the library; to install or update extensions with a single click; and even to download the entire Inform extension collection at once, if that’s desired
• The Mac IDE has been overhauled quite a bit, with Toby Nelson (brother of Graham) also working on it: the search box much improved, syntax coloring sped up so that typing an open bracket no longer produces a major stall, and various longstanding glitches removed