Can’t be technical reasons, since Vorple is amazing, so is the reason that it’s too new (so it couldn’t be added to Inform 10) or was some drama involved?
Inform is moving in the direction of shipping fewer extensions built-in. Because (a) it’s supposed to be easy to install new ones, and (b) extensions update more often than Inform does.
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Yeah, but something as groundbreaking as Vorple should be included or at least get support from the IDE when it’s there so instead of making dummy “releases” of our games just to test stuff that’s Vorple-specific, we can do standard testing in Inform itself.
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That unfortunately is much harder to do. Possible, but a lot of work for the IDE developers, who aren’t the same as the Inform developers. (Basically they would need to include a web browser with full CSS and JavaScript in the IDE.)
Isn’t that how it’s done now? Parchment running in the browser inside IDE?
Not for Linux, at least; it’s running a Glk-based interpreter with a custom Glk implementation that links it into the rest of the IDE. Browser-based interpreters are a relatively new thing by Inform standards.
Vorple was built as an interpreter and historically required some degree-of-difficulty to use. This has only recently been made much easier with advanced browser interpreters and Borogove.io. When Inform came out it made hooks for different online interpreters Release along with a website and the Floodyhoo interpreter and that’s what Vorple uses.
Browser play with multimedia is only a very recent development in the US - though I think Vorple is commonly used by French IF developers.
It’s like asking “if cream cheese is so good on a bagel, why don’t bakers include cream cheese with their bagels?” Because cream cheese is not the option everyone wants.
Back in the day, most everyone who played Inform games were particular about their own interpreter of choice and forcing one on those people was almost a faux-pas. Doing tricks with the text of a parser game instead of letting it follow their specific interpreter settings was a thing some people would rage-quit over.
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Well yeah, but we’re talking about an option here, not replacement. I don’t even want Vorple as default, just have option to use it without having to download and install it.
You have the option to use it now…
You can use it pre-installed via Borogove…
Unless Vorple has significantly changed you can’t just Publish a Vorple game from the Inform IDE. You must host it online in a browser environment to make it work.
It’s like a car manufacturer leaving you ports to plug in your own electronics, but they don’t support those electronics.
This isn’t unprecedented though. Almost any web project written with Python is going to use Requests but for similar reasons to what zarf said, Requests isn’t included as a default package in Python because it’s updated far more frequently.
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I’d say make a suggestion on the tracker. If this isn’t already planned, they’d probably consider your input.
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