I think Inform just exploded.

Authoring Inform 7
1

Consider this code:

Your Kitchen is south of Your Living Room. "This is your kitchen. While less messy than your living room, it is still disgusting. There are food stains all over the counter, floor, and table. You use one of the drawers in your counter as a junk drawer for lack of a better storage space. You really should clean up this hole sometime, son. In the corner of the room there is a relatively small staircase in an alcove leading down to your basement." The counter is in the kitchen. "Your kitchen counter only seems to have one drawer left. The rest were torn out and either stolen or destroyed as a result of a crazy party you had a while back. Of course, this was before your house wasn't enough of a sty to scare off any potential company."

Inform produced this error on building:

[code]This is the report produced by Inform 7 (build 6F95) on its most recent run through:

Problem. You wrote ‘The rest were torn out and either stolen or destroyed as a result of a crazy party you had a while back’ : but assertions about the initial state of play must be given in the present tense, so ‘The cat is in the basket’ is fine but not ‘The cat has been in the basket’. Time is presumed to start only when the game begins, so there is no anterior state which we can speak of.

Problem. You wrote ‘Of course, this was before your house wasn’t enough of a sty to scare off any potential company’ : again, assertions about the initial state of play must be given in the present tense.
[/code]

If I were to replace the whole text of the kitchen counter with “text.” about 50 other things in the source just become broken somehow. It makes no sense at all. Any ideas? Is this some kind of known bug?

Edit: It seems as though Inform is reading descriptions as actual code instead of just text. I’ve made sure there aren’t any mission quotation marks anywhere though, and I can’t pinpoint the source of this problem for the life of me.

2

Compiles for me (in 5Z71). Are you sure you haven’t skipped a quotation mark somewhere in your code? The parts in quotation marks should be showing up in bold, I think.

Also, in this:

I think “before” should be “when” or “back when” – compare “This was before your house was such a sty it would scare off any potential company.”

3

Thanks for that, nice catch. But no, it doesn’t work at all on my end. Are you using a Mac or Linux version of Inform? I’m running on Windows, and descriptions and the like show up in blue rather than bold. As for my build, I’m running 6F95, I just downloaded it last night for use on my laptop, and grabbed the project file from my desktop.

I’m absolutely positive I haven’t missed any punctuation at all, honestly. I have a feeling this is a bug of some sort. I could post the errors that I get after changing that description, if you’d like.

EDIT: I found the problem. I have a friend collaboratively writing this with me, and I just copy/pasted something that he wrote. I used double quotes instead of single quotes INSIDE the description, so everything looked copacetic, but it threw all the formatting off.

The original code was:

The closet has the description "Your closet door (as well as all the other doors and door frames in the house) is painted a rich blue, in contrast with the radiant orange that adorns your walls. It is scarred with veritable fives of tens of knife holes from when you were doing "target practice" with a steak knife you stole from your mom a couple months ago. The knife is nowhere to be seen."

I had to change “target practice” to ‘target practice’.

Again though, thanks for catching that little grammar mishap.

4

I don’t get this error either using the code you posted (6F95, Mac OS).

–Erik

5

Yeah, it was something in an earlier block of code causing a weird formatting error down the line. It’s resolved, not a bug or anything. Just a syntax error that didn’t really show up as one.