Sadly publishing work to e-readers is not a simple task, as they are a pretty closed system. You might want to talk to Jimmy Maher about it. He has developed a platform for the Kindle. Publishing to the web is also an option, as most modern ereaders have a browser. Or, if you can do without the random behaviour you could publish to epub or mobi format with hyperlinks.
filfre.net/2012/01/the-king- … e-answers/
Here’s some more info about Jimmy’s project.
When comparing programming systems, I have always been impressed by articles that created the exact same code in several languages. I recommend creating a custom room with a couple objects, maybe a container, and replicating that in each of the languages you cover, sort of like “Cloak of Darkness”.
Another thing when you talk about Inform is it’s probably the most powerful and most flexible of the systems available, while at the same time being one of the easiest. Even if you go for something like Alan or ADRIFT or Quest, there are still rough around the edges issues. But with Inform, even if you can’t do it in the natural language you can hard code portions in I6.
Could you give an example of one of these “rough around the edges issues” which somehow Quest suffers from yet Inform manages to magically smooth its way around?
I also would like to see this added to the ifwiki. David Welbourn has done some work there to that effect (ifwiki.org/index.php/Category:Examples_of_code), but there’s much there that could be added. I am a fan of Cloak of Darkness’s approach, but I personally find the outdated links to be a bit of an eyesore so it’d be great if we could surpass it in usefulness.
Besides everything that’s been mentioned, maybe multimedia-capable systems could also have screenshots of nicely feature-representative games.
Sorry, Alex. I didn’t mean to step on any toes. I was just saying that Inform has a pretty significant community that either has a lot of instructional stuff or extensions that do a lot of stuff. Some other systems don’t have the same user base. Perhaps I worded it badly.
Documentation, for one. Apart from anything else, Inform ships with (at last count) 445 code examples, each with full context, indexed by subject and searchable within the application. Quest… well, I’ve just spent all morning trying to find anything about how you control paragraph and line breaks in output.
To be honest, Alex, I was just now refreshing my memory about Quest. I find it to be very similar to ADRIFT in the fact that you have a window-based interface with a lot of forms. I find that structure to be very confusing. I like reading code in a linear format and I also like copying and pasting reused stuff. I also have difficulty working with systems where I am partly fighting the application itself. When I code in something form-based, I am frequently fighting bugs in the interface. If I code in Inform, I am really just fighting peculiarities in the compiler. As long as I can remain within it, I am good.
And you can’t categorically say you’ll 100% eliminate those issues, Alex, because form-based development systems will always be victim of the IDE used to develop them. Yes, I am sure that compilers have bugs too, but it seems like they tend to be less.
What, in your opinion, is the best example of a Quest game? The best games I’ve seen were probably the Mansion games and the Sir Loin games, which were largely / completely menu driven.
duodave: If nothing else, Quest allows you to ignore the IDE completely and code directly in ASL / ASLX.