I am devouring maps and Stowe and such, I endeavor to be able to wander though buildings and neighborhoods and check them out, complete with the criers shouting at appropriate times of day.
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The other one which is really cool is “Chronicles of London Bridge” by Richard Thompson, which is a description by a gentleman who decribes it as someone who saw it all.
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Another. Thank you.
Nice!
Doesn’t that get disorientating for the player if they are interrupted at an arbitrary point during the automated navigation? Do you aid the player with landmarks during the automation? What if a player wants to interact with another character they happen to pass along the way but it’s optional to do so?
Also: have you seen this in other games/engines?
Isn’t that what a good MUD does to some extent?
And don’t forget Ruby!!
(Which powers this very forum! ;))
If you want to create IF on the go, check out the neat website at https://borogove.app/ which lets you edit and compile I7 games (and other formats) online.
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The movement isn’t entirely automatic; the player has to tap Return to continue. All the same, it does seem there’s a need for better feedback beyond a text explanation.
Status bars, a map, and a diorama of nearby NPCs all seem indicated. I just wish I had more time to work on this stuff 
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Cool. Didn’t know about that service.
@tundish
I think it’s a very reasonable expectation of new players to expect to be able to go to a location by name. I’ll be curious to see how you work out the edge cases of that locomotion method.
Please tell me you’re reading John Evelyn’s and Samuel Pepys’s diaries!
Absolutely.
Jim Richards
I’m a bit late to this topic, but thought I’d share anyway.
I am in the process of having an app developed for Interactive Fiction illustrated children books. The difficulty ranges from around what 1st graders are reading to upper elementary students. I have 10 books written/illustrated so far…most of them around 70-80 pages.
Gamification has been a buzzword for the last decade in education, and I think IF allows children to feel as if they’re playing a game, without sacrificing the process of reading an actual story or book, as opposed to a lot of reading gaming apps.
But…if we can get kids interested in these kinds of stories and loving them from an early age, then it could help potentially widen the audience/fans of IF in the future.
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Let’s have kid play them and then in 50 years time, someone on a forum will post “when did you start playing IF ?”, and the most popular answer will be 2020-2030 and others will be like “but I wasn’t even born ?!”
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Would be nice if I as an author describe as text what I want to create and the software visualizes it for the player.
Can’t be too difficult as long as the aim is a primitive prototype. Parsing for keywords like Alexa does it, and chosing 3D objects from a library. Needs plenty refinement from then on.
That is just what the Doctor ordered! I now do a majority of my day job on an iPad (connected to various systems), so the lack of inform7 necessitated me having a MacBook as well.
Thanks much!
ZIL/ZILF has been on quite the journey over the last 4 or so years. Increase in interest around 2018, then a big boost in numbers and interest after the source code dump in 2019, 8-bit adventurers dabbling with it, then got super busy in late 2020 including the OG Imps briefly returning and being active in the Facebook group, then tbh the ‘busyness’ cooled off a lot during 2021 for reasons I can’t really explain (people eh… unpredictable buggers). Just sort of ticking along now. Who knows what for 2022 onwards. 
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The learning curve for Zil / Zilf is pretty steep. The available documentation is terse.
Your videos are a big help.
I hope to write at least a small game using Zilf for including in the Winter 2023 TADS Jam which is going to include Zilf games.
My understanding of ZIL is… ZILch. My impression is that Inform can create the same works with less struggle. Does ZIL offer anything unique for the tradeoff of its learning curve? Since the thread is about “the future” are you thinking that the future of IF lies in going back to ZIL? “Everything old is new again” and so forth?
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I agree with you, but it’s not that way for everyone. Some people would rather code and hate I7’s natural language interface. And some know I6 like the back of their hand. For me, I7 nearly as fun to write as it is to play.
ZIL is the language the Infocom Implementors used, so it’s like maintaining the old magick and that’s good for history, education, and experimentation.
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