Feature wishlist?

Is there any sort of centralized “feature wishlist” for Inform 7? I’ve searched around the web and IF forums for one, but couldn’t find anything.

As far as I know, there is no central place at the moment. There once was a forum at the “Uservoice” platform, but that doesn’t exist anymore.

You might however be interested in this thread where several feature wishes were mentioned: [I7] Limits of extending I7

Additionally, you could maybe post your ideas as issues on the unofficial bug tracker, marking them as feature requests instead of bugs. (Although @Dannii will have to say whether that’s in the intended scope there.)

Uservoice archive (incomplete).

One that occurred to me a little while ago is that I wish moving things in-game were an activity to make it straightforward to put hooks on it.

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Thanks – maybe I’ll check out the bug tracker. Right now, I’d say my #1 desire would be to allow for empty lines in phrases. I hate having it all cluttered up as one big glob of text, and I can use [] as a workaround but that feels ugly and inelegant!

I think your best bet for now is to hold your feature requests until Inform is made available on Github as open source; then they can be filed/tracked as issues there.

You might well wonder when that Github repo will go live. I predict it will be another year or two.

At the first NarraScope conference June 2019, Graham Nelson estimated the Github repository would be ready by Autumn 2019. At the second NarraScope conference in May 2020, he acknowledged that he underestimated the work involved, and said in Q&A that he wouldn’t publish his work in progress to Github, but would wait until the work was “finished.” He said that it would be “certainly before NarraScope 3, but, with any luck, quite a lot before. I am working on what amounts to a draft version at the moment. I think experience suggests that I probably shouldn’t give actual deadlines at this point.”

At that time, it was reasonable to think that the third NarraScope conference would happen in May/June of 2021, but the NarraScope committee decided to skip that year, so his prediction could technically come true. As of today, I’d wager that there will be a NarraScope sometime in 2022, and that the Inform Github repository will not be ready by then.

Graham also said that his Github profile represents the work he’s doing on Inform, and you can see there that he’s doing something almost every day, and more than usual in the last couple of days, but we can’t really see what he’s doing.

Anyway, he’s working on it! Something’s going to happen, I think. Eventually.

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Great topic!
Dark mode dark mode dark mode dark mode!
That’s my wish.

yeah, I’m not a fan of syntactically significant whitespace in general; that it’s so easy to break I7 code with vertical whitespace drives me to distraction.

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IDE feature requests can be made immediately:

(Windows) GitHub - DavidKinder/Windows-Inform7: Front-end for the Windows version of Inform 7.
(Mac) GitHub - TobyLobster/Inform: Inform is a design system for interactive fiction based on natural language

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