Is it possible to develop IF on a Chromebook?
Non-development question: What is the best way to play IF on a Chromebook? Zedt?
My son would like to give a demonstration at school on how to create your own IF, but he’ll only have access to his Chromebook.
I showed him how to create IF with Inform many years ago. I’m a little excited about his renewed
interest.
(Apologies if this post seems familiar. I originally posted it to rec.arts.int-fiction, but was told that group doesn’t get much traffic nowadays.)
Playfic is a web text editor that will attempt to compile your text with the ni and I6 compilers. It offers none of the features of Inform 7 and is not remotely a replacement for Inform 7 development.
We should, as a community, start an open source project to develop a fully functional browser based I7 IDE as the capabilities to do so are entirely available. I’ve played around with the basic constructs, but this is not a one-man job. It would require serious front-end chops and probably using an MVC framework like React or Angular.
Then we’d have a better answer for “can I develop IF on ____ using Inform 7”.
Turns out the wireless in his classroom is less than reliable, so he won’t be able to use PlayFic or any other online options. His current plan is to program it at home w/ Inform 7 on Windows, use screenshots to show the development process, and have a playable version running on his Chromebook using Zedt (unless there’s a better Chromebook-compatible interpreter anyone can suggest).
You might not want to shave this yak but it also seems possible to run a virtual machine of Windows on ChromeOS using QEMU or perhaps some other software.
I doubt I’d want to set up his Chromebook for that (if it’s even possible on that specific machine…it’s tied to the school domain and they’ve locked out access to some stuff), but now I want my own Chromebook to do something similar (install Crouton).
Looks like Playfic is actually using I7 r6G60, so now he’s decided to use that instead. I guess the wireless isn’t as bad as he thought. He tested it earlier today and it worked fine. All he’s planning on doing is explaining how to create a couple rooms and some simple objects in I7. He only has 5 minutes for his speech/demonstration, so there’s not a lot of time to do much.
He’s written a more complex game that others will be able to play through afterwards.
Wow! Looks like I’m late to the conversation (about four years!).
Anyhow, I’m also wondering if Inform can (four years later) somehow be used on a Chromebook. I’m a middle school teacher looking to incorporate IF into my teaching of language arts. We are, however, a fully Chrome OS environment. In fact, we haven’t even got a traditional computer lab anymore!
Any movement on this? Half the schools in the US are now exclusively Chromebook, and England is going the same way. Our school here in Cambodia has been Chromebook-only for 3 years.
playfic is soooo slooooow, especially when the site gets bogged down by lots of kids saving repeatedly.
Now the (huge) overhaul is (mostly?) complete, is a Chromebook/web version of Inform possible?
I’m the author of a system called Adventuron Classroom, which is an online text adventure authoring system.
NOTE: The game editor currently requires a non-mobile client, so if opening the editor via and Android or iOS mobile devices, you will be informed you need to log in via a laptop or desktop computer.
Anyway, Adventuron should be fast (once initially loaded), as it doesn’t go back and forward to the server during use, and it caches in the browser after accessing the first time, so it should be fine for a whole classroom with limited bandwidth.
It runs fine on a Chromebook, and is expressly developed to be used in classrooms (has an inbuilt tutorial). Games, once developed, can be exported as a single file html files with no external dependencies. Games will run on desktop, tablet and mobile platforms.
I recently started a game-jam here:
Do try out Adventuron, and see if it fits your needs. It’s nowhere near as advanced as Inform but for beginner level text adventures, it’s perfectly adequete, and the online tooling should fit low bandwidth / high latency scenarios (once cached).