I just wanted to say Hi to everyone since I haven’t been around the IF world since 2012 started. So much has happened! Inform got a big update! People got married! I got married! With kids!
I’ve been poking around this corner of the web the past few days just reading stuff. Another new Inform official site. Something called NarraScope talks. Read the big patch notes from 2015 (wow!). Did I miss anything else impactful?
Oh, uh, on-topic: I have smartphone now so I tried out running a glulx game on my phone. Pretty easy to do (I already had a web server) but Android just ignores the “Glulx Text Effects” extension? Like, color and reverse?
Given the mention of a web server, I assume Parchment/Quixe.
Quixe doesn’t currently support Glulx style hints, it expects you to write custom CSS instead. Which can be both good and bad. It’s good in that it gives you more control for a website dedicated to a specific game, but it’s bad for a generic site intended to run multiple games.
Although I vaguely recall there being a branched version that did include more support…?
NarraScope and a handful of other things are mentioned in the “What’s New” section on the front page of IFWiki. Another big change is the creation of IFTF.
I looked closer at this (the vanilla one not the fix posted below) and it’s infuriating.
So I copy-paste the Table of User Styles into styles.css after Release and fix it up. Doesn’t work because the table uses “alert-style” while Quixe uses “Style-alert”. WTF. And it’s capitalized.
Still doesn’t work. The default style takes precendence because it’s prepends each with .BufferWindow so I have to do that.
Still doesn’t work. The stupid play.html file includes styles.css first, then interpreter/glkote.css, instead of vice-versa, so the default styles still win.
Oh I see, thanks Dannii. Also thanks for “Friends of Inform 7” on github. I would’ve lost the majority of my extensions otherwise.
And furthermore,
rant
What’s the deal with I7 extensions nowadays? The windows app has cool “extension projects” now, but finding stuff is hard. I looked up a way to hide the status bar, thinking it was a vanilla feature, then went to Basic Screen Effects to set its Depth to zero (no workie), and then… I found out I can’t search extensions for “status bar” or the like? Like, I can’t search my locally installed stuff, I can’t search the Public Library, the Source and Documnetation search boxes neither seem to touch them… And then I got hella confused just navigating. The app says “You have 99 further extensions installed. These are marked with a blue folder icon in the catalogue below. (Click it to see where the file is stored on your computer.) For more extensions, visit www.inform7.com .” But nothing is on that site except a redirect. It doesn’t say “click this here Public Library button”. Clicking the PL button I can’t search. (They’re grouped by a human which is ok.) Lots of extensions seem missing cause there’s only one for status lines and its an exit lister. “Install all” but still can’t search. Searched this forum, found your github, can’t search that either. Searched this forum again, found a mention of an EmShort extension, found it in the github, copy-pasted it over to install. BAck to extension page, can’t pull up source for it. (Docs by clicking the name or the file explorer via the icon.) Source was found in the FILE menu of all places.
Yeah, one of the other things that changed while you were away is that the Public Library went sort of “poof”. It’s still up but AFAIK there’s no curator any more so nothing can be updated. The extensions GitHub is the de-facto replacement at present but it’s not integrated into the IDE at all. (You can either download individual extensions and File -> Install Extension, or you can clone the whole repo as your personal Extensions directory – the latter is easier to keep up to date but carries more risk of surprise breakage.)
For searching extensions, I just point grep and/or $EDITOR_OF_CHOICE (with Find in Files) at the Extensions directory, but that only helps if you have a few pretty strong keywords; it doesn’t help you find things thematically.
You can alternatively go to Extensions -> Home and Ctrl-F to Find in just that tab, but that only searches extension names and the initial blurb, not the rest of the extension source/docs.
For reading installed extensions, you can either go to Extensions -> Home -> (“by date used” is usually the best sort, I think) to read just the docs, or File -> Open Installed Extension to read the code as well.
It’s probably important to mention that the extensions GitHub didn’t start out life as intending to replace the PL – as such most of the extensions that are in the PL are not in the GitHub, and vice versa (though usually when one appears in both, the GitHub one is intended to supersede it).
So in reality you currently need a mish-mash of both the PL and the GitHub together if you want All The Things.
If it makes you feel any better, Real Soon Now™ (pending for the last three years or so) there’ll be an open-source release of I7 and that’s likely to break most of the extensions as usual anyway.
That’s been pending since before my hiatus, so no change there.
I’m also really loathe to complain about extensions getting trounced by internal changes, because I don’t wish to discourage those changes. They’re usually sensible and improve the language, sometimes significantly. I say this as one of the bigger victims of this slouching towards perfection.
Slight change of subject: I’d like to “open source” my programmers guide to I7. Now that I’m a dad I’ll never have the time to update it let alone be an expert on I7, but I know that it filled a need for some people. Maybe the Friends github would accept it in a docs folder? I noticed Jim Aiken’s manual is no longer on inform.com as well.
I appreciate your “open sourcing” your I7 programmer’s guide, whose need a revision, putting it on par at least with the current I7 release, albeit the new, opensourced I7 is an unknown re. mantaining documentation, but should be an interesting collective work in the interim between the current inform and opensource I7. If you noticed, Zarf has done an interesting addenda to the DM4 with the help of other denizens of this forum.
Felicitations agains for your family life and
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
In historical news, the source code for the Infocom games was leaked to the world. Definitely a gray area, but so far no one seems to have taken offense. (That’s not the original announcement, but I think it’s the best organized place to look at.) Also, the source code for the Magnetic Scrolls games has been recovered.
You might have been here to catch Counterfeit Monkey, but you almost certainly missed Superluminal Vagrant Twin, 80 Days, Hadean Lands, The Wizard Sniffer, and the new edition of Anchorhead https://anchorhead-game.com/
