ZILF 1.0 released

Technical Development Development Systems
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ZILF was first announced in July 2009. The initial release, 0.2, included one sample game: a port of Cloak of Darkness, with its own primitive parser. The announcement on rec.arts.int-fiction teased three things to come in the future:

Since then, the parser has grown in sophistication and become a true standard library. Advent was ported and became the first full-length game written in ZIL since 1989. And now, sixteen years later, all three parts of this prophecy have finally come to pass.

At long last, I give you ZILF 1.0.

Changes in this version include a new system for customizing the status line, easier modification of standard verbs, improved Unicode support, a new command-line experience, and yes, experimental support for compiling to Glulx. (You’ll also need Glazer for that.)

Get it at zilf.io, where you’ll also find links to documentation and our Discord server. Visual Studio Code users can get the ZIL language extension from the marketplace.

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at least you recognise that is production-grade :slight_smile:
(which was since 0.8, capable of compiling the mass of legacy code everyone known well…)

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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I may be missing something again here, but I just downloaded and tested this v1.0 build with the idea that I could compile my new WIP with a different name or extension in one command. I tried zilf hotel.zil hotel.dat and also zilf build hotel.zil hotel.dat but both fail to produce a hotel.dat file - at the point where zapf should be invoked, I just get the zapf ‘usage’ help info. I can do this as a two step process with - zilf -S hotel.zil followed by zapf hotel.zap hotel.dat but from the zilf build -h help it looks like this should work as a ‘combined’ zilf command ?

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Oops! Good catch, it didn’t work when passing a second filename. That’s fixed in 1.0.1, which is available for download now.

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Yea, verily, they say the prophecy was first uttered on Usenet and that it has been handed down through the ages ever since.

Congrats, Tara! Very cool.

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Now, if I could only wrap my head around ZIL and its syntax the way I managed with TADS… At least there’s plenty of example code out there.

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Version 1.1 is now available for download. It features some big parser improvements (topics, missing verbs, “everywhere” scope, better syntax line decisions), better integration with the VS Code extension, and the “even more experimental” Glulx mode I used for Zork II and III over here.

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Version 1.2 is now available for download, featuring some Glulx improvements (GLK function, better V4/V5 compatibility) and library fixes (ordering NPCs, drawing the V6 status line).

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Love this project, and the excellent way that you present it on the site. The REPL is a nice touch.

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Version 1.3 is now available for download, featuring Blorb support, parser improvements, debugging improvements, an updated Cloak of Darkness example, and minor bug fixes.

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