Hi everyone!
I’ve just discovered Inform7 and it looks like a fascinating development language/environment. I’ve been interested in languages/development techniques/virtual machines for a long time but haven’t thought about IF in decades. But now I have kids and was thinking of introducing them to Zork, and then I thought “I wonder if people are still developing this kind of thing?” And … yay
So then I became curious and started looking into the tools for developing them and found the Inform7 language to be fascinating and am eager to experiment! I would prefer to do so without having to use a Windows VM. That would be the last resort. I run Linux Mint (which is basically Ubuntu 18.04) but the available packages for Debian/Ubuntu are for really outdated editions and will not install. So I have tried two things so far …
Attempt #1: I downloaded the source code and tried to build it. There were a number of dependency problems, but with some effort I was able to work through all but one. Running ./configure --enable-deb complains that no package for ‘goocanvas’ could be found. I installed a bunch of related packages but they aren’t recognized. I was able to solve the other dependencies this way but I have no idea what to do about this one. (I am a developer, but I don’t know squat about Linux Gnome programming.) If anyone has any ideas, or has this already compiled, that would be awesome.
Attempt #2: I installed and ran under Wine. This actually installed perfectly and seems to run fine until I click “Go”, and even that works, parsing, compiling and all, until it is time to actually launch the game - then I get a crash. My guess is that it is trying to interact with a web browser or HTML library. This simple approach came soooooo close … If no one here has any ideas about this, I may ask on the Wine forum.
Any thoughts are appreciated!
Cheers,
Greg