I know that there’s already a topic similar to this one, but that’s from 2017, so maybe there’s some kind of an update. I’m trying to make a game, but the IDE keeps on crashing, usually after trying to compile something. Before the crashes were manageable, but now they are happening almost every other time I press the play button. I don’t think it’s just my computer, as I experienced similar issues (but to a somewhat lesser extent) on another device.
Of course, this is a… substantial… obstacle to speedy development. I see that there are two main potential solutions to this: switching to the Windows edition of the IDE using Wine, or switching IDEs and using Inform 7 via the command line with another editor. But directly accessing the command line with the Flatpak version of Inform 7 is a bit of a pain. Using the Windows edition certainly could work, but I’m not sure how transferring all the files over would work. Are there any alternative solutions?
Looks to me like you have a good grasp of the possibilities.
If you go the Wine route, moving your files shouldn’t be hard. The Linux IDE will have created a directory named Inform (directly under your homedir by default, if I recall correctly). In it, you’ll see a bunch of directories named project.inform and project.materials.
Run the Windows IDE under Wine and create a junk project. It will also create an Inform directory; I think the default is /Users/your_login_id/Documents/Inform.
Copy all the contents of the former to the latter.
If you have installed any extensions for global use (as opposed to for a specific project under its project.materials/Extensions directory) there would be another step. I’ll go into it if you say it’s relevant.
In case you haven’t tried this yet, consider clearing or heavily trimming the skein. I don’t think that’s ever fully solved my issues with the Linux IDE, but I was surprised at the extent to which it helped…
I have frequent, but not unbearable, crashes when compiling. Sad to say I can’t provide useful information: they seem totally unpredictable to me, no pattern at all.
I’m having the exact same problem at the moment. Is there any chance you’d be happy to share what you ultimately ended up doing about this, and how well it worked out in the end?
I have discussed (and strongly disagreed) with the author of i7/10 IDE, and in the end, I used a nifty, crude but efficient, pair of shell scripts, one for compiling in .z8 and the other for compiling in glulx, I have posted those in another thread here, but if one wants, I can repost both here.
Another linux user here who is simply sucking it up… : P The ide always saves before crashing, so I’m not too nervous about losing work, and I can reopen the file on which I’m working quite quickly. I might even be able to speed that up by making my files more accessible, but as it is it takes me maybe four or five seconds to get everything open again, and all of my projects are several subfolders deep.
I’m more annoyed about the fact that leaving a game running in the ide eats up my cpu in the background and might crash my whole computer if I don’t notice it… or that the public library seems to be eternally disconnected… or that I can’t search the documentation at all while a game is running…
Yeah, me too, I have no idea what the heck is going on with this ide. I mostly write my code in Emacs, I usually only use the IDE for running the code, the Skein, etc. Sometimes I think about creating an Inform IDE clone within Emacs, but it’s just a dream for now…
There’s also my Inform 7 for Unix Nerds project. It’s not nearly as polished, and it’s built for bare Inform 7 source files rather than project folders, but it uses a newer version of Inform, it includes copies of Writing with Inform and the Recipe Book that you can view in your browser, and it also includes a Makefile snippet you can use to automate building for Z8 or Glulx in release or debug modes.
Having sort of resurrected this thread, it seems worth mentioning that I’ve had far fewer crashes since eliminating a very large extension of sorts from my project. I had been using a modified version of Nathaniel Nerode’s Neutral Standard Responses to replace the default Inform responses in my game, and eliminating that for the time being has made the IDE behave a lot better. (I’m now also running into a problem where the index won’t display any text - though it is on screen since I can click and drag it - but that’s not as much of a problem as the crashing was.)
