Anyone still using Inform 6?

Authoring Inform 6
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Hi! Doe here, formerly know as doeadeer3 at an email I no longer use, also Marnie Parker.

I created the IF Art Show and helped create the Inform Review Conspiracy. Haven’t been around for years.

In my 70’s now, I started on the old if mud with grad students around age 24, when I was 48.

Author of Carma, The Family Legacy, and Dragon George and Visualizing.

In my retirement-retirement I would like to finish some WIPs, some that were close to being done.

I never cared for Inform 7, mainly because I am dyslexic and I would put with or when in the wrong place in a sentence. Inform 7 was created for non programmers, I had been a programmer and I loved looking under the hood. Too hard on Inform 7 to do that, did some beta testing for David Cornelson and took a strong dislike to it.

I got very good at Inform 5, then Inform 6, I liked classes and inheritance. OOP.

Unfortunately, due to losing computers and cell phones and my web site, very long story, I no longer have any source code.

However the plots and puzzles of my games I remember. Like to finish 3, two sci-fi, one mystery.

But I forget how to do all this. Downloaded Winfrotz and was able to play Family Legacy and Visualizing. Still have to figure out how to play Carma.blb, but will get there. Glulx game.

But going to start with Family Legacy. Fix it and add on. When Whizzard was running the yearly comp he allowed me to withdraw it to fix in a day and I found I couldn’t do it in that timeframe and withdrew it completely. But it was actually a great game and a few people played it over the years and teally liked it.

I put in eating and drinking routine like in Infocom games, unfortunately timed for every 15 or 30 turns, and it drove people nuts. I did not know how to do a timing daemon back then. Later a computer crash mangled the source code.

But I think there decompilers now. I have to rewrite it anyeay, but that would give me some source code to begin with.

It is Inform 5, I guess on Windows II I can get to a DOS window, terminal, somehow if I have to.

Does an Infocom z machine decompiler work on Inform 5?

Can anyone recommend one that would?

Hey, Zarf, can’t believe you are still around. Shout out, I finally figured out Space Under the Window. The hint in the title. You a sneaky clever guy. Haven’t replayed it though, but bet this time I could win it.

I never saw the maze in Hunter in Darkness. Notice there is a topic here. Yes Zarf made his successful game player winners, of his games, feel very smart. I also felt that way with many Infocom games. Later I found many games to be too much story without that I-solved-a-difficult-puzzle feeling. Unsatisfying. But maybe that is just me.

Marnie Parker aka that Doe person

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Hi!

Yes, people still use Inform 6. I think the majority of Inform 6 users these days are trying to build small Z-code files – they are aiming at retro platforms like the Commodore 64. But you can still use I6 the way you did in the 1990s.

Does an Infocom z machine decompiler work on Inform 5?

Yes. They might be a nuisance to set up and run though. I still use TXD (see Index: if-archive/infocom/tools/ztools ) but there may be more recent alternatives.

Hey, Zarf, can’t believe you are still around

Yeah, it scares me too sometimes. :)

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BTW, I object to the speed if I wrote on the ifmud being listed on the if wiki. David Cornelson promised me no one off the if mud would ever see them.

I found I could not code that quickly. And they were scavenger hunts, list of odd items to include. I came up with great titles then the plot and then could not finish them, so they seriously hover (euphemism for another word). But I will contact the maintainers of the if wiki about that.

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Hey, thanks!!!

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Hello Marnie, welcome to this forum.

I always appreciated the IF art show. I’m not sure but I think Emily Short’s Galatea was made for the show. Is that correct?

Beyond that, IF art is a good concept for beginner writers (like me) to get started.

I tried Inform 6 but TADS3 fits better for me.

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Hi Marnie! If you can believe it I was just looking at your site on the Wayback archive yesterday because I thought I remembered you writing a guide to using TADS 3. Welcome back.

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WELCOME BACK, MARNIE “IF ART COMP” PARKER !!!

You will be delighted in finding that the IF Art in the end influenced the IF community, because in the last 15 or so years there was a shift from puzzles to narrative.

Also, in the last Spring Thing I submitted an entry openly inspired from the If Art concept, aptly named “The Portrait” :wink: albeit its english is a bit questionable :confused:

On your question, Inform 6 is still well alive, thank also to a new library, PunyInform, which (or whose) gives much more compact code, and on top of it, bring back the good ol’ .z3 format, which now is perhaps the oldest VM format in continuous use.

for Peter: yes, Galatea was an IF Art entry.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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@doeadeer3, I’m glad to see you here!

FYI, some of your Inform 6 instructional materials are catalogued in the sticky post on the Inform 6 forum titled “The List of Inform 6 documentation.”

The material used to be up at http://iffydoemain.com/infotips/index.htm, but that link went dead in 2020. Some of it was captured by the Wayback Machine, but unfortunately not all of it. It sounds as though you may have lost all digital copies, but if you have it up at a new location or are able to make it available in some other form (such as PDF), please let me know – I would like to make sure that it gets archived properly.

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Thanks, I lost most of the site, because I did pay Freehostia. But glad some was archived in the if wiki. I may, someday, fill in missing parts, like example coding. If I relearn enough. Heh.

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Yes it was. Her impressive first outing she only wrote in a few days. She entered late, but I let her. I thought she had a great conversation system and wanted her to share the source. So insider information, she showed me some of the source code. It was SPAGETTI. A programmer knows what that means. She used flags to branch to other addition questions. I could not make head or tail of it. She was yet to learn all of Inform. How she could hold all those flags and branches in her head at one time amazed me. Shows what kind of brain she had. I asked a lot of questions gathering additional information that was not pertinent to finishing the game. She was into the classics and had learned Latin, a dead language. Later others would come up with conservation menus that I used in one of WIP. I actually marked her down because her source was unreadable by anyone else. The truth was I was a bit jealous of her, she had no background in programming except maybe BASIC. I found her very intimidating. A lot of us did later. But people starting knocking her because they couldn’t keep up and that was not fair. A better writer, a better programmer? We all contribute our imagination. Jealousy is ugly in any form.

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Thanks. I was wondering if there were any other copies.

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Actually I did the IF Art Show because I DISLIKED the shift to more narrative and fewer puzzles. It was to show if you skipped puzzles all you had was ART. I finally added puzzles allowed and the entries got more interesting.

I was trying to increase the depth of interactivity just in exploring how far you could go with responses to the five senses and talking. When Emily entered Galatea she proved my point. There were tons of branches in her conversation. Depth could be increased.

Nyah, me I am a gamer. I loved Infocom games for the stories AND the puzzles. I can read Kindle books if I want to read books. The original imps were limited by computer memory at the time, so their descriptions were brief, but their puzzles were great. They gave hints to solving them in the text. Then they published InvisiClues, that some people tried to add as menus in their games. (Clever.)

All my life I had played games. From Go Fish, Clue, Yahtzee to Hearts and Spades. To Pinochle in college. In a single group in my 30’s I played Risk, Lie, Cheat and Steal, Backgammon and tons of card games. Later I would teach others games. I have played most board games, except chutes and ladders, I was to old when it came out. Let’s not forget Trivia Pursuit, and all itd variations.

Later aI was a TV about a friends,very in England, where trivia games were done at a bar, team against team. Looked like tons of fun. I think Jacqueline S. Lott took that up in a non bar setting.

I never had to win all the time, I just enjoyed playing. Kids actually LEARN by playing. Humans learn better if it is fun, like playing. We played “let’s pretend” when I was growing up. We had a pirates club. My Dad’s old paint table was out ship. I never could keep a straight face later when people got into role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. To me it was let’s pretend. The thing about games is they have RULES. If you win you learned the rules well or bent the rules so you COULD win.

I played and bought tons of Big Fish games, Hidden Object Games turned into Adventure games, IF. Plot with mini puzzles. Good graphics and sometimes videos. Got a new laptop, downloading all I bought, 200? Lost count. Fun as hell.

So my games will be “retro”, trying for a fair balance between plot and puzzles. I developed a dislike for linear games. I liked Infocom games where you could wander all over the game map. Graham’s first example games were like that. In the end I got a bit disgusted, the IF art Show made people NOT think when it was supposed to make them think.

I felt Interactive Fiction was the closest we would ever come to AI, the NPC part especially. The AI Assistance in Facebook and Windows II is simply annoying. I am not some darn demographic where you can assume what I like and dislike.

I think you have me confused with someone else.

My games will definitely be “retro.” Anyone can do choose your own story. For true mimesis, you NEED puzzles, like the ones you solve everyday in real life. (Should I got shopping now or later, do I make a list, do I have enough on a credit card, take cash?and do I have enough gas? Do I call a friend, first? We do it all day long. Puzzles are logistics, decisions about logistics.)

And programming, is to me puzzle-like solving programming challenges. IF programming was much more challenging than doing database programming.

Hehehehe. You will like my games or not. I hope I live long enough to finish them. I am not much of a writer, myself, writing style-wise, but I can come up with good plots. Puzzles ARE hard to design. They are THE challenge. I like challenges. Easy bores me.

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When I was a kid I played “let’s pretend” that was mostly time travel or space travel. I had the guts of a big old TV and some old swivel chairs that served as either a rocket or a time machine depending on my mood. I dragged the neighborhood kids along with me. By the time the 80’s rolled around I started playing D&D, almost always as DM because I usually have more fun that way. Not so different than the way I directed those pretend games when I was younger. What attracted me to D&D was that it IS “let’s pretend” - but with RULES!

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As historian, I agree with Marne and Mike: early IF was inspired, if not designed, along the lines of pen-and-paper RPG of their times, and many 70s-late 80s instruction notes that the computer is acting as a DM. (hence the customary usage of the 2nd person in IF, I suspect)

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Welcome back Marnie! It’s great to hear from you. I really mean it.

To answer your first question, yes, a lot of people still use Inform 6. A search on IFDB will prove that. It’s nowhere near as popular as Inform 7, but the games are generally more to your style. I’d say they’ve generally got more puzzles, less flowery text and are more fun to play.

The PunyInform library is probably more popular than the Inform 6 standard library, as it creates much smaller and faster z-code files. There are some differences from the standard library, but you can adapt to that fairly quickly and the documentation is fairly good.

I’ve played all your z-code games (Dragon George and the Man, The Family Legacy, Kids Shouldn’t Have to Save the World, Tears Keep Getting In My Dr. Pepper and Visualizing) and submitted maps and solutions for all except one to CASA.

The one I haven’t submitted is The Family Legacy. I spent days trying to solve this, but I believe it is unfinishable. I would love to see this finished, as it’s quite a good game. If you can’t find the source code, you can get a start with the infodump and txd decompilers. (I think there’s another one, but I can’t remember the details.) I have a map and a couple of transcripts that may help with a reconstruction.

On the subject of the IF Art Show, it’s interesting to hear that you did it because you disliked the move to narrative and were trying to prove a point. I think you proved that point quite admirably. I generally hated those games. A game without puzzles has no challenge, so it’s not a “game” and it’s boring. There were a couple of exceptions. Your game Visualizing was one of the exceptions, but it had puzzles that made it interesting.

Once again, welcome back.

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Interesting. I don’t know if anyone has watched Community, it was an off beat show that became a cult classic. I saw it later on Netflix, about middle of the first season they started riffing on TV memes. One was even cartoon show. Clay animation too. It follows a study group, one of the study group has something like Asperger’s and wants to be a film maker. They start living in his head sometimes. It starts with paintball, I think. Then pillow fights, they set up tents in the hallways at night. It is a community college, we call them junior colleges in California.

Anyway, they start playing Dungeons and Dragons. The Asperger’s guy is Dungeon master and he allows no variation from the rules and drives the rest of them crazy, they want to change their characters to be elves or mages or something, so they have magical powers. Seems they can only do that by dying and coming back as a different character. So they start putting themselves in dangerous situations, off themselves in other words, they drive him crazy…

I may not be remembering it all correctly, maybe it is only the second season that goes completely off the wall. But it is worth the wait.

One of the funniest situation comedies I have ever seen. You can catch it in reruns somewhere. For some reason I kept thinking of IF as I watched it, different genres, maybe?

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Thanks. It did include lots of puzzles, that you did not NEED ton solve to win, ie finish the game. But if you solved puzzles you saw more of the game. It actually went on longer than most people thought. I think the rope/tire swing is the last thing. Not sure. Pretty sure I put in the help screen the more you play the more you get.

I thought it was a darn good game, so thank you. I actually had most of those experiences myself, playing in a friend’s back yard that had a creek running through it and the old shed with the pickles. I think that gave it a certain poignancy.

I saw Mark at my 50th HS reunion told him about the game, I played there with him and his younger sister, Heidi. We exchanged business cards and he was interested in playing it. It had his email address. Later I lost it and kicked myself. He had never heard of IF but would really have enjoyed the game.

The reunion committee made up business cards for us. A lot of us were retired by then. But we were warned six months in advance, and the cards at least said our name (married women their maiden name in HS), our phone number if we wanted it, and our email address. We could add a line or two about our business if we were still working, or what we HAD done. It was an incredibly good idea.

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I wrote a game in TADS2 decided maybe I liked it better in T3. Maybe, I found T2 easier to understand. I may or may not finish iit.

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Oh it was finishable. But only if you figured out the timing of eating and drinking. Water is crucial to finishing the game, so you have to find the outside faucet. A fee people did finish it. Like I said I did not know how to do the timing daemon, in how many hours had passed. I played it with the timing disabled and did not realize that every 15 or 20 turns was too often. I did "fix’ it by upping it to 30+ turns. That made it harder to realize you needed to find the faucet and bucket.

While I withdrew it from the comp, I saved the altered version at the archive. People who played that version did finish it. I just didn’t publisize there were two versions. In all his years of running the comp, Whizzard, Kevin Wilson, he is on Facebook, only allowed two people to fix a game after submission.

It was still a pain in the ass as the eating drinking routines still happened too often. Somehow, although I withdrew it, people still got a hold of the comp version. I think Whizzard had already zipped filed for one platform and forgot to remove it. and most played the comp version.

Whizzard went on to design board games, that were published by game companies. Fairly successfully, though he is always hoping for a D&D hit.

My hard disk crash wiped out the code for Legacy. I did find a defrag program where I found some of the files. Hard disc back then did not always write to the same part of the disc, like a record player, the needle could jump around to avoid scratches. I printed parts out and tried to arrange them in the right order, but it was useless.

Decompiling it and rewriting it in Inform 6 with a proper daemon is the way to go. Most people didn’t realize it was a ghost story. I was going to add an Elvis period, maybe. Just to bring it up close to the 1950’s. Maybe.

Thanks.

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I’ve gotten good mileage out of the reform decompiler. Here’s some sample output for legacy.z5 (release 1/971011):

family-legacy-decompiled.zip (182.6 KB)

The included legacy.sym file is a stub symbol file.

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