[IF and Linux] Inform 7

-
What is it?

Inform 7 is a new but already widely used interactive fiction language, but also the IDE which has been developed in tandem with this language. (It is not the now version of Inform 6, which it hardly even resembles. The name is a bit confusing.) In terms of writing interactive fiction, Inform 7 is probably the most important application, so it is a top priority for IF on the Linux desktop.

Availability for Linux

When Inform 7 came out, there were a Windows and a Mac OS X version, but no Linux version. (I wrote Fate on Windows.) Today, however, there is a Linux version, thanks to P. F. Chimento; it is written to integrate well with Gnome, and is available as a .rpm for Fedora 10 and as a .deb for Ubuntu 8.10. These packages will presumably also install on other version of Fedora/Ubuntu and on other distributions that use either .rpm or .deb. You can also try to compile new packages from source, which is available from SourceForge.

Finally, there is a command line version of the interpreter available for various hardware architectures, thanks to Adam Thornton--but I won't be talking about that.

Ease of install

If your distribution is supported, installation is trivial. You download the package, double click, maybe give your root password, and that's it.

(The only way to make installation easier would be to get Inform 7 accepted into the official repositories of the major Linux distribution. But since the compiler is not free software, I don't see this happening--which is a shame.)

Functionality

Linux Inform 7 has almost everything that the Windows and OS X versions have: a source window with syntax highlighting, a fully functional index, the ability to compile and play the game within the IDE, and so on. As far as I know, only three things are missing:

1. "Blessing" a part of the skein so you can check whether your transcript changes as you change your code. I never used this in the Windows version, so I don't miss it.
2. You can only play one game at a time within the IDE. If you are working on several projects, you must stop one game before you can play the other. This too is only a minor annoyance.
3. The current interpreter doesn't support Unicode (it is an older version of Gargoyle), which means that it cannot handle indexed text. This is a major annoyance, but I have heard that it will be solved in the next release of Inform 7.

All in all, the functionality of Inform 7 under Linux is good, and chances are that it will soon improve to very good.

Overall

Using Inform 7 under Linux is a good experience, which will probably become even better soon.

(Screenshots

Does anyone know a way to add screenshots to a blogger post that is not a pain to use?)

Comments

  1. Anonymous3 March 2009 at 13:55

    There was an interim release of I7 for Linux in December

    gnome-inform7_5U92.1-0ubuntu1_i386.deb

    I'm sure this update included the lastest Gargoyle, which now has unicode and indexed text support.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Andrew Hickey3 March 2009 at 15:51

    They've stated an intention to eventually release the compiler under a Free Software licence along the lines of the TeX licence, once it's out of beta.

    I can state for the record though that the .deb packages install fine on Debian (though I did have to symlink a library file because I was using a newer version of a library than it was looking for) as well as Ubuntu.

    ReplyDelete
  3. namekuseijin3 March 2009 at 23:28

    I actually tried install the IDE .deb but my Ubuntu from one generation behind is missing a few libs I don't plan on upgrading any soon. Neither I have had the patience to compile it (although I did compile glulxe).

    I'm using the command-line i7, which works just ok. I open a shell tab with it and another with vim, where I write down the story. Then CTRL+pgUP for the previous tab and C to compile, then CTRL+pgDwn and CTRL+z frotz Project.inform/Build/output.z5 to test it. No syntax highlight, nor skein, but works ok.

    I truly love the natural language subset syntax and the error, I mean, problem reports from the compiler. It's possible to go writing a full I7 basic game by just having a few notions of I7 and following the problem reports on peculiar syntax constructs...

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Keeping the narrative pressure on

-
I played another session of Trollbabe yesterday, and I would like to take the opportunity to write a little bit about GMing this game (and similar narrativist games). This is not a worked out manifesto so much as an attempt to think through an approach that I've been taking more or less instinctively. First, some context. This game was online, with two people I had never played with before: Judith and Katy. Actually, it's not quite true that I never played with Judith. I've known her for some 38 years, and possibly the first roleplaying I was ever engaged in was on a vacation with her family and my family. She acted as a kind of story guide, and I and her brother Adriaan played characters in an unfolding short story. I was thrilled by the possibilities inherent in such an activity, but it would take more time before I really discovered the world of tabletop RPGs. Both Judith and Katy played a bunch of roleplaying games before, though as far as I can judge they were all fai...
Read more

Walter Benjamin, "Der Erzähler" (The Storyteller)

-
In the comments to my last post, Ian mentioned an essay by Walter Benjamin , Der Erzähler ( The Storyteller ). Benjamin was an important German philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century; he wrote on a wide range of topics, but his best-known work is probably his essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (it is widely cited as The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction , but The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility would have been a better translation). Der Erzähler is a very rich and complex essay. It claims to be a reflection on the work of Nikolai Lesskow (in English known as Leskov, I believe); but it also touches on the difference beween a story (in the sense that a storyteller tells stories; Erzählung , not Geschichte ) and a novel, on the communicability of experience, on the role of death in modern life, on the nature of wisdom, on the relation between man and nature, and on several other topics. All...
Read more

Thoughts on a Trollbabe session

-
Yesterday, I played a second session of Trollbabe with Erik and Michiel, even more delightful than the first. ( Trollbabe . I dislike the title of the game, to be frank, but it's the only thing about it to dislike. Let me stress that the whole point of the game is that you're playing strong, independent women. With horns.) To give you an impression of the context, let me say that both Erik and Michiel are very good friends of mine, and that we've done a fair amount of roleplaying before, though mostly D&D. In fact, the two of them have played various editions of D&D almost exclusively, and neither had any previous GMing experience. That was about to change. In the first session, I GMed their characters Rolda (Michiel) and Vekir (Erik), who were together in a single adventure -- something that is not a given in Trollbabe . This time, we were going to do the same thing, but in addition I would also get to play a character, one adventuring at a different location. Mi...
Read more