I may be misunderstanding the situation. If I’m wrong, please fill in the blanks for me.
It appears that Vorple exists (or will exist) in two forms – for Undum and as an Inform 7 extension.
The latter appears, at present, to suffer from a very significant limitation, which is that it will only work with Z-machine games, not with Glulx games. Thus the size of the game will be, for the present anyhow, quite limited. When a possibly large Vorple extension is added to an existing story… Also, will it be possible to test the Vorple display in the IDE, or will authors have to hit the Release button each time they want to test how their Vorple code looks; losing, in the process, the ability to take advantage of the other debugging features of the IDE?
The Undum side appears, at first glance, to be more open-ended (provided you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and learn Javascript and HTML 5) – but an Undum story can’t be saved and restored at a variety of points. You can save exactly ONE version, which will automatically load the next time you launch the story. At that point, if you decide you want to try an alternative path through the story, you have to start over again from the very beginning (and lose your currently saved story state when you do so). There seems to be no way to save a “bookmark” for the story before making what may be a significant plot choice and then return to the bookmark later and try the other branch.
If true, this renders Undum utterly unusable for any sort of serious work.
Any insights on this question, from the developers or others, would be much appreciated. I like the appearance of Undum/Vorple stories a great deal, but in the absence of a solid save/restore mechanism, I would have no incentive to learn Javascript or HTML 5.