I’m running a ‘Text Adventures’ club at my school. We’ve installed Inform on the networked computers. However, we’ve run into a weird bug. Everything seems to be working with the source code… except the Story panel displays as blank. When I click on the other tabs (Results / Index etc) it all seems to be present and correct. But it isn’t showing the text / input to actually play the game.
Is there a likely reason? It’s got our IT team foxed at the moment. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Last time something like this came up, it was because Norton had quarantined part of the Inform compiler as a “virus”. (Which it isn’t, but Norton is not very smart.) I bet that’s what’s happening here.
As Andrew says, this is usually idiot anti-virus software getting in the way. Recently we’ve had multiple reports of this. In the directory that Inform is installed in, check the contents of the “Interpreters” sub-directory. There should be three files in there; “frotz.exe”, “glulxe.exe” and “git.exe”. If any of these are missing, as is very likely, this is the cause. Check whether your anti-virus has quarantined any of those files.
I couldn’t even install Inform without it blocking the install file. I have AVG installed. How can I override this thing without removing AVG?
From Releases · DavidKinder/Windows-Inform7 · GitHub you can download the latest version as a zipped file, extract the contents and just copy it where you want it, that avoids the installer. If AVG complains about the contents you might be able to report it to AVG as a false positive.