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I've spent a long time messing around with Inform7, for quite a few years on and off, and then I kind of stopped after realizing a few things: 1) it's incredibl

I've spent a long time messing around with Inform7, for quite a few years on and off, and then I kind of stopped after realizing a few things: 1) it's incredibly frustrating and inefficient to write games in an English like language when you're a perfectly capable programmer, 2) if I try to do any even slightly more complex programming I'll be shot in the foot, and 3) I'm terrible at writing puzzles. I did try to solve the first two problems by trying Inform 6, but it's just not a great language and that third problem is a sticky bugger. (: Anyway, Inform has an extremely powerful and featureful IF engine, and one that I dearly wish I could tap into using some kind of decent programming language (even ZIL!). It going open source gives me hope that that might become possible in the future. If anyone knows of any good IF libraries for existing programming languages (especially Lisp) that would be awesome.

BeetleB 7y ago
>I've spent a long time messing around with Inform7, for quite a few years on and off, and then I kind of stopped after realizing a few things: 1) it's incredibly frustrating and inefficient to write games in an English like language when you're a perfectly capable programmer, 2) if I try to do any even slightly more complex programming I'll be shot in the foot, I've heard that people who get annoyed with both 1 and 2 usually use TADS instead of Inform.
- logicprog 7y ago
  Yeah, I'll have to look into TADS again, it's just (IIRC) it costs money that I don't have to spend on this sort of thing.
  - BeetleB 7y ago
    TADS has been free for as far as i can remember. Perhaps 20 years
    - logicprog 7y ago
      Yeah I checked up on it today and I don't know what I was thinking. It looks very nice too, and the resources are pretty great.
Eli_P 7y ago
IIRC Inform 7 .i7x is internally translated to Inform 6 .i6t source which is more low-level C-like language. Have a look at code pieces formatted as (- ... -) in installed Inform extensions. You can mix 6 and 7 together. BTW I tried to feed some Inform 7 code to APE[1], which is a parser of an English subset written in Prolog, without much success as I recall. As for existing IF tools the first come to mind are Twine and Ren'Py. [1] https://github.com/Attempto/APE https://github.com/Attempto/APE
- logicprog 7y ago
  Yeah, I have actually tried I6, the problem is it's much lower level and doesn't get a lot of the power of I7. I want the power of I7 but without the COBOL-tastic syntax.

BeetleB 7y ago

>I've spent a long time messing around with Inform7, for quite a few years on and off, and then I kind of stopped after realizing a few things: 1) it's incredibly frustrating and inefficient to write games in an English like language when you're a perfectly capable programmer, 2) if I try to do any even slightly more complex programming I'll be shot in the foot, I've heard that people who get annoyed with both 1 and 2 usually use TADS instead of Inform.

logicprog 7y ago
Yeah, I'll have to look into TADS again, it's just (IIRC) it costs money that I don't have to spend on this sort of thing.
- BeetleB 7y ago
  TADS has been free for as far as i can remember. Perhaps 20 years
  - logicprog 7y ago
    Yeah I checked up on it today and I don't know what I was thinking. It looks very nice too, and the resources are pretty great.

Eli_P 7y ago

IIRC Inform 7 .i7x is internally translated to Inform 6 .i6t source which is more low-level C-like language. Have a look at code pieces formatted as (- ... -) in installed Inform extensions. You can mix 6 and 7 together. BTW I tried to feed some Inform 7 code to APE[1], which is a parser of an English subset written in Prolog, without much success as I recall. As for existing IF tools the first come to mind are Twine and Ren'Py. [1] https://github.com/Attempto/APE https://github.com/Attempto/APE

logicprog 7y ago
Yeah, I have actually tried I6, the problem is it's much lower level and doesn't get a lot of the power of I7. I want the power of I7 but without the COBOL-tastic syntax.