Using Inform 7 on Microsoft's XNA framework (a rant)

Man, that would be nice. I don’t mean to knock C# or C++, but with all the values that run from 0 to 1 in the framework, I’m really tired of typing things like 0.3f all the time and really wish I could just define a unit as in Inform 7 and just say the more natural 30% instead.

And C# on XNA has these things called “delegates” which are like type-safe function pointers, except they’re actually a list of same. And the event publish/subscribe model of the architecture uses delegates by adding “game components” to an Update and/or Draw delegates, which just makes me go, “oh, so each of these is just an empty rulebook then? Well why didn’t you say so?”

And then when I go back and look at code I wrote months ago, well, don’t even get me started on readability. Especially Inform versus the C family. Linear algebra is annoying enough but if I could just define a few to-phrases, just a few of them, please!

I don’t mean to knock the XNA framework. For creating games it’s fairly sane and well-named. I just wish I could use Visual Inform 7 on top of it. It would be so much more fun… and clear. Oh the clarity I could have. Surely a port would be less trouble?

I’ll have to agree, a VS interface for Inform 7 might be interesting. I could see making an application in Visual Studio and coding stuff within it in natural language.

At the very least it would be fun to write a game that had its own self contained interpreter.

As for XNA, I’ll have to agree it would offer a new market to be able to make xbox 360 games in Inform.