not having encountered text adventures since the late 80s, I stumbled across Inform7 a few days ago. I have played around with it a little since, mainly out of a general interest in programming languages. It’s really an interesting language and the IDE & documentation is cool. Great job!
I took a few notes along reading ‘Writing with Inform’ and ‘Inform7 for Programmers’ that I compiled into a brief quick reference. The aim is to summarize the most important structures of the language as concisely as possible.
This ‘Cheat Sheet’ is pretty sketchy. But I thought I make it available in case someone might find it useful / interesting. It can be downloaded from: user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~moreiser/inform/
I’d be curious to hear what people think, so any feedback is greatly appreciated!
Looks like a very useful thing!
(… and I hope you might consider extending it to include the same kind of info about relations, tables and lists, too, some sunny day (or rainy night) …)
One thing I noticed is that you included “change foo to bar” under “phrases to do something.” This is now a deprecated phrase, meaning that the Inform developers hope to remove it in a future build and are trying to get people to stop using it now. At least that’s what I think it means. That might be something to flag (the way you flagged procedural rules.)
Anyway, I’ve downloaded it and will definitely be looking at it.
(By the way, are you related to the mid-twentieth century humanist philosopher Oliver Reiser?)
You’re right, probably it would be nice to also have tables and relations covered. I skipped them at first, because I did not want to exceed 4 pages. But probably a fith won’t do much harm.
Thanks for the remark on the deprecated phrase. I’ll add a comment on that. And: no I am not related to this philosopher except that I was born the year he died (a few months later). So reincarnation might be on hand here A polt for an IF!!
Very nice, this. Design and typography is clean and makes for pleasant reading. I’ve needed this kind of summary for a while, so I’ll definitely use it. It’s almost like a slide rule for I7 writers.
The only comment I can think of concerns the action-processing image. If you made it a vector image like the rest of the document, it would probably read better in printed form.
The changes are listed on the web page at the above link. I noticed that the pictures in the old PDF were not presented/printed properly in some version of Acrobat Reader on Windows. This should be fixed now.
A polt for an IF!!