Another Puny(Inform) Step
Aug. 18th, 2022 08:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerReporting on having managed to get an older compiler for text-based adventure games working with a special library promised to make adventures much older computers wouldn’t choke on provided one more post for this journal. I finished that post, though, aware of an obvious next step but not quite certain if I could manage it before flitting along to some other hobby of the moment. All I’d done was compile a sample Inform 6 source code file (adapting “Cloak of Darkness,” a sort of “minimal adventure to try out different text adventure systems”) provided with the PunyInform library. As for cobbling together even simpler experiments of my own, I thought back to when I’d dabbled with Inform 6’s successor. Inform 7, however, operates on altogether different principles, and I was also thinking of how I’d found some guides and introductions to Inform 6 years before but never got around to writing my own games.
Having the compiler at hand, though, was one step I hadn’t taken before. Going back to my introductory guide once more, I puzzled my way through turning my very first Inform 7 experiment into Inform 6. It took a bit of work sorting out when to use commas and when to use semicolons, but in the end I had a working file, one occupying much less disk space than Inform 7 compiled into and suitable for putting on disk images for my emulators. I could acknowledge Inform 7 had given me a bit of a sense of how to arrange things in Inform 6, but did find myself thinking the older language’s use of “before” was at once a bit different from the newer’s use of “instead of” (that various introductions had nudged me towards, anyway) and somehow just a bit easier to accept as following from actual intent.
While I had a few more old experiments to adapt, my thoughts turned again to the adventure MST3K: Detective and the adventures Crow T. Robot and Gypsy had been said to program in its introduction. (I at least didn’t have to deal with Tom Servo’s because, as MSTing authors could be insistant on repeating, “his arms didn’t work” and he couldn’t type anything.) Crow had got a bit too wrapped up in his own adventure’s introduction to get beyond it, so I was able to dip into my Inform 6 guide and produce an expanded “print text and quit” starter program. Gypsy’s adventure had some interactivity and required I dig a bit deeper into my introduction to Inform 6, but I did manage to duplicate its description. Experiments are one thing, of course; even the most old-fashioned text adventure innocent of any pretensions to “interactive fiction” needs a lot of ideas. That’s where “being interested in the idea of interactive fiction but almost never buckling down to playing actual games” becomes a problem.
Having the compiler at hand, though, was one step I hadn’t taken before. Going back to my introductory guide once more, I puzzled my way through turning my very first Inform 7 experiment into Inform 6. It took a bit of work sorting out when to use commas and when to use semicolons, but in the end I had a working file, one occupying much less disk space than Inform 7 compiled into and suitable for putting on disk images for my emulators. I could acknowledge Inform 7 had given me a bit of a sense of how to arrange things in Inform 6, but did find myself thinking the older language’s use of “before” was at once a bit different from the newer’s use of “instead of” (that various introductions had nudged me towards, anyway) and somehow just a bit easier to accept as following from actual intent.
While I had a few more old experiments to adapt, my thoughts turned again to the adventure MST3K: Detective and the adventures Crow T. Robot and Gypsy had been said to program in its introduction. (I at least didn’t have to deal with Tom Servo’s because, as MSTing authors could be insistant on repeating, “his arms didn’t work” and he couldn’t type anything.) Crow had got a bit too wrapped up in his own adventure’s introduction to get beyond it, so I was able to dip into my Inform 6 guide and produce an expanded “print text and quit” starter program. Gypsy’s adventure had some interactivity and required I dig a bit deeper into my introduction to Inform 6, but I did manage to duplicate its description. Experiments are one thing, of course; even the most old-fashioned text adventure innocent of any pretensions to “interactive fiction” needs a lot of ideas. That’s where “being interested in the idea of interactive fiction but almost never buckling down to playing actual games” becomes a problem.