Please help: my Inform 7 is broken

Authoring Inform 7
1 
Playing the Game - Failed
The application compiled and ran your source text, but the interpreter for the resulting game failed to start. This should never happen.

There have been cases reported of this occurring when anti-virus software has incorrectly labelled the interpreters as malware, or infected with a virus. If you check in the Interpreters directory under where Inform is installed (which is usually C:\Program Files\Inform), then there should be three files: frotz.exe, git.exe and glulxe.exe. If any of these are missing, this will be the cause of this problem, and you should check whether your anti-virus software has incorrectly quarantined any of these files.

This is what I am suddenly getting whenever I try to run any of my projects. There is nothing wrong with the source text themselves; this happens whenever I try to compile any project.

I completely uninstalled and reinstalled Inform 7 and it’s still happening. The three files are there, perfectly fine, and Windows Defender hasn’t found any virus or taken any actions since I got this PC. I have the most recent version of Inform 7 from the Git.

Here is the console log:

C:\Program Files\Inform\Compilers\inform7 \
    -internal "C:\Program Files\Inform\Internal" -external "C:\Users\snows\OneDrive\Documents\Inform" -project "C:\Users\snows\OneDrive\Desktop\anotherform.inform" -format=Inform6/32d
Inform 7 v10.1.2 has started.
I've now read your source text, which is 1530 words long.
I've also read Basic Inform by Graham Nelson, which is 7691 words long.
I've also read English Language by Graham Nelson, which is 2328 words long.
I've also read Standard Rules by Graham Nelson, which is 32164 words long.
I've also read Basic Screen Effects by Emily Short, which is 2223 words long.

  The 1530-word source text has successfully been translated. There were 1 room
    and 9 things.
Inform 7 has finished.

C:\Program Files\Inform\Compilers\inform6 \
    -wSDG +include_path=..\Source,.\ auto.inf output.ulx
Inform 6.41 for Win32 (22nd July 2022)
In:  1 source code files             96269 syntactic lines
 82898 textual lines               2457561 characters (ISO 8859-1 Latin1)
Allocated:
  9259 symbols                     3461537 bytes of memory
Out:   Glulx story file 1.260605 (575.5K long):
    23 classes                          49 objects
   234 global vars                   88205 variable/array space
    99 verbs                           343 dictionary entries
   180 grammar lines (version 2)       248 grammar tokens (unlimited)
   104 actions                          37 attributes (maximum 56)
    39 common props (maximum 253)       27 individual props (unlimited)
471549 bytes of code                109289 unused bytes stripped out (23.2%)
142173 characters used in text      110347 bytes compressed (rate 0.776)
     0 abbreviations (maximum 64)     3294 routines (unlimited)
 82091 instructions of code          46616 sequence points
116224 bytes writable memory used   472832 bytes read-only memory used
589056 bytes used in machine    1073152768 bytes free in machine
Compiled with 3365 suppressed warnings
Completed in 1.00 seconds

Compiler finished with code 0

What do I do? I can’t work on my projects until this is fixed.

1 Like
2

Assuming it’s not your I7 build…

One quick troubleshooting step that may not work but is worth a try:

Copy your source text and create a completely new project. Paste in the source text and see if it throws the same error. I’ve had that where a source file just got borked and rebuilding it worked.

Another thing to do is comment out sections of your source text (surround with [ ]) and see if it runs. When it works, you’ve narrowed down that your problem is in the commented-out section somewhere and you can un-comment more and more to zone in. Alternately make a new file, paste in the first section of code, see if it runs, then keep adding sections to reconstruct what you have until you get an error.

If you know what you did last before it stopped working, that’s a good place to start.

If your code is spaghetti and not organized, this might be difficult - you could try commenting out half of it - if it runs (or throws a more logical error due to missing code) comment out the other half…then when you find wherein the problem is, comment out half of that…rinse and repeat until you isolate the problem.

It’s not fun, but can help you hone in where the problem is.

2 Likes
3

To clarify, I made a new project that absolutely should compile (just threw in the ‘Bad Hair Day’ example from the documentation) and that threw up the same error. So somehow, my Inform itself must be broken…

4

Sorry for the misinterpretation since you’ve tried it.

Probably also fruitless suggestions - how did you uninstall to reinstall? Did the uninstaller clear everything, or is there a separate project folder (that could be corrupted and left behind) that the new install picked up on?

(Sorry I mainly use Mac and forget how Windows works sometimes.)

5

I finally managed to find the solution after digging deep in the forums.

For some reason even though my virus program showed no signs of quarantining the files, going into Preferences, Advanced and changing my interpreter to Git has fixed the issue and things are compiling again.

2 Likes
6

If it helps, if I were in your situation, the first thing I’d have tried would be to go to my anti-virus program and create an exception for the Inform 7 folder. I solved so many random weird errors like that… accourse, I am then careful as to what I allow in the folders with the exceptions.

(I would also re-install Inform 7, just as you did, after setting the folder as an AV exception)