Can't seem to release as a playable webpage (10.1.2)

[GJHmf]

Hi all. I’ve been dabbling with authoring in Inform 7 for the past 2-3 years and have successfully been releasing builds on that run in an IF interpreter (Frotz… etc.), all good there - but an annoyance that caused me to stop a couple of years ago still plagues me today.

No matter what I do in Inform 7 v10.1.2 (fresh install, Win10 or Win11), using ‘Release along with an interpreter.’ in my project does not output anything in my materials/Release/interpreter folder to play my game as a playable webpage when I select to Release. Does anyone have any foolproof advice on how to get this to work?

I also can’t seem to release with cover art, but the web page output is the primary issue I want to solve.

[Ally (Allyson Gray)]

I wonder if you might be missing a line of code?

Here’s what I have in my projects, for comparison:

Release along with a website.
Release along with an interpreter.
Release along with cover art.

[GJHmf]

@Ally

Release along with a website.
Release along with an interpreter.

Thank you for the swift reply. I’m sure it’s a ‘me’ thing, otherwise I’d see a lot more posts about this - however, using these lines just now in my project still does nothing. Odd.

Are there any particular user permissions I need to run Inform 7 under to make this work? Does the project need to remain in My Documents/Inform/Projects? I dislike that everything is dumped into My Documents by default, but that’s a different annoyance.

[Ally (Allyson Gray)]

Hmm, good questions! That does seem odd!

I’m not very knowledgeable about the more technical aspects of the Inform IDE (though I share your dislike of the file locations, haha)… maybe someone will have heard of some rare bug that could cause that kind of thing?

I can say that for me, the path to the browser-playable release is:

C:\Users\Ally\Documents\Inform\Projects\The Little Four.materials\Release

(Not actually in the interpreter folder—just directly in Release, as a play.html and/or index.html file)

[GJHmf]

Hi, thanks for the confirmation on where the play.html file would land. I moved my project back into My Documents and attempted to Release again - no change

Are there any archives anywhere containing freely available projects created in 10.1.2 I could download and build that are known to release as a playable webpage? Trying one of those would confirm to me whether it’s a ‘me’ issue (if it worked), or an environment issue (if it still didn’t).

Thanks.

[zarf (Andrew Plotkin)]

The minimal project

"Test Case"

Release along with a website.
Release along with an interpreter.

The Kitchen is a room.

…will build and release.

[BadParser]

What actually happens when you hit release? You should be seeing something like this (I’m using macOS so yours will look slightly different:

Note that the graphic doesn’t show the play.html file, but it is in there:

[GJHmf]

Ah ha… this worked, thank you.

So it’s definitely a ‘me’ issue, which I’m comfortable admitting. I think I’ll start a new project and build up from scratch using this working minimal example, incrementally pasting in my story content.

A big thanks to everyone for their help.