3 votes

The Futures of Inform (Talk transcript and slides)

4 comments

  1. skybrian
    Link
    From the talk: [...] [...] [...]

    From the talk:

    This is a talk about where the Inform project stands now, how it will develop, and what new features are coming on the near and farther horizon. As I go on, I will get more speculative, and I’ll try to make each five-minute segment of this talk more interesting than the previous one.

    [...]

    That takes us to the huge proposal IE-0009, which we’re calling “Dialogue”. This may completely change how Inform is used in practice, and opens up the possibility of creating entirely different interactive experiences. The one-sentence pitch for this feature would be: Flowing conversation as easy to write as in IF languages like Ink or Twine, but the full power of Inform’s world model and natural language conditions and actions underneath always available to enhance that.

    [...]

    Well, so what is Dialogue? It’s the ability to have sections of an Inform source text which look like a printed play or movie script rather than like a printed novel or short story. Dialogue was designed by Emily Short, who is one of the world’s leading narrative designers, and in particular is an expert in this conversational-modelling space. It looks simple and easy to write, but gains great flexibility from being underpinned by the full power of Inform underneath.

    [...]

    There’s a whole automatic process of not reoffering options, of making options conditional on the world state, and so on: it’s much more flexible than this example shows. Indeed, the “director”, the runtime manager for conversation, does its work through activities and rulebooks, just like other components of Inform, which makes it highly customisable.

    1 vote
  2. [2]
    nothis
    Link
    This looks interesting but it goes into git repositories before it even shows an example. It is a tool for creating text-adventure style interactivity? Anyone got a good example of seeing it in...

    This looks interesting but it goes into git repositories before it even shows an example. It is a tool for creating text-adventure style interactivity? Anyone got a good example of seeing it in action?

    1 vote
    1. skybrian
      Link Parent
      It's the latest evolution of a very old tool for building Infocom-style text adventures. There are lots of free games on the IF archive, many of which were written in Inform since it was fairly...

      It's the latest evolution of a very old tool for building Infocom-style text adventures.

      There are lots of free games on the IF archive, many of which were written in Inform since it was fairly dominant for a while. Most interactive fiction doesn't come with source code, but the specialized binary formats that they're distributed in are very stable, going back decades. You do need an interpreter to run them.

      There are some games with published Inform 7 source code, but they will be hard to understand since it's a rather unusual language. It might be better to start with simpler examples from the Inform 7 manual. The documentation is extensive, but it's not geared towards programmers (it assumes no programming experience) and so the language can be hard to get into.

      I've never written a game, but I did once dabble in poetry written in Inform 7.

      1 vote
  3. eladnarra
    Link
    Ah darn, I missed Narracon. Ah well, at least there's stuff like this to read! I got into reading/playing IF a long time ago and even considered writing something in Inform, but I never got it off...

    Ah darn, I missed Narracon. Ah well, at least there's stuff like this to read!

    I got into reading/playing IF a long time ago and even considered writing something in Inform, but I never got it off the ground. I don't think I've looked into things for at least a decade...

    The Dialogue stuff is really interesting, and I'm not surprised it's by Emily Short. Her games have almost always featured conversation in interesting ways. I recommend Galatea to anyone who wants to see where this idea basically originated. I can't believe it's 22 years old!

    1 vote