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Can anyone compare Ink to Inform? I played with Inform many many years ago and have always wanted to return to it.

kd5bjo 6y ago
I haven't played with either of them much, but they seem to take two fundamentally different narrative approaches. Inform is primarily simulation driven: You describe a world model. Every user input translates into some action that affects the world, and the world changing produces relevant output. Ink is primarily narrative driven: You write the text as a branching story, with a set of explicit options for each branching point. Variables can be read and changed arbitrarily, but have no meaning other than how the narrative uses them.
Multicomp 6y ago
Inform 7 is used to make Zork-style games. GET covid. GO WEST etc. Ink is more comparable to Branching narrative software like Twine, or Visual Novel software like Ren'Py.
- irrational 6y ago
  I am familiar with inform and zork (which auto-corrects to dork ;-) but not with how that is different than branching narrative software. How are they different or similar?
  - megameter 6y ago
    Branching narratives are like Choose Your Own Adventure books. You can get 80% of the way to what Ink does with a carefully programmed static website. But this is an environment designed to author that, and to publish to game engines as well. The main competition is Twine, which is more focused on a self-contained deployment. Twine also got a huge update recently with its "Harlowe" theme supporting storylets - scenes that trigger from a pool or "deck" based on logic you program.
  - jccalhoun 6y ago
    zork and other "parser" games would say something "you are in a room with a table and a door to the north" and there would be a cursor. Twine and "choice" games would say something like "you are in a room with a table and a door to the north. Do you want to look at the table or go to the door?"
    - irrational 6y ago
      I see. So the one is a puzzle or game and the other is a choose-your-own-adventure story.
- anthk 6y ago
  You can omit "GO", the parser will understand "west" fine. Also, Inform6 is better suited for a "logical old-school" programmer than if7, where using it for non-English languages can be a huge mess.
Kinrany 6y ago
On the software side, ink is open source and has C# and JavaScript compilers, a Unity plugin and a separate IDE called inky. Inform7 is not open source yet, although they had plans in 2019. As far as I can tell, it's a single app that outputs its own format that can be uploaded to https://www.ifarchive.org/ https://www.ifarchive.org/ Disclaimer: I've never used either, ink just seemed more legible.
- skybrian 6y ago
  To add some detail, Inform 7 compiles to reasonably well-documented portable binary formats that have been standardized for decades, with the earliest versions dating back to Infocom days. There are a variety of emulators, including web-based. This is why games uploaded to ifarchive many years ago still work. Even if an old game’s source were available, they were sometimes written in obscure genre-specific programming languages that nobody uses anymore. The binary formats are specific to the genre, which is pretty niche. Casual users are unlikely to have downloaded an emulator even if it’s easy to do, so a game will be bundled with one when it’s published to an app store. But as formats go, it seems like a pretty remarkable success story for the long-term preservation of games, and it would be neat if there were a similar file format that were more general-purpose and more popular, much like we have for images, music, and video.
gHx8 6y ago
Because ink is a type of markup language, using it to write narrative is very easy. You're writing the script for your game and ink will handle how parts of it connect to eachother. It is also very portable owing to being plaintext with relatively simple syntax. There are currently ports of it in both Unity and Unreal, and many developers have used it in some capacity for html/css/javascript games. Procedural generation can be done in ink, however you may need to use the frontend language to save them for later; ink does procedural text very well but has a weak concept of objects. Inform7 is a declarative programming language with english-like syntax. It's quite good compared to ink at simulating objects with a lot of metadata. However, the runtime isn't quite as portable as ink; as a result, Inform7 has no easily located Unity or Unreal packages. Ordinarily, I would recommend Inform7 where you need to process lots of content and randomly generate things. But it seems in addition to having an arbitrary runtime entity limit of 1000 things, those things must exist before you randomize them. Although counterintuitive, procedural generation is more challenging in Inform7 than ink! Use Inform7 when you need a language that can reason "because Alice's relation to Bob is at -50, Alice hates Bob. Because she hates Bob and he is walking nearby, she can trip him. If she does, he will take a random amount of damage and Bob's relation to Alice is reduced by 20." Use ink when you need a highly portable language that can script /other/ frontend frameworks or languages. Ink has been used in 2d games, 3d games (notably Heaven's Vault), on the web, and on three different game engines (Unity, Unreal, Godot). Ink is also very good at making variations on text and tracking how often parts of the story have been visited. They're both excellent tools for interactive fiction, but they excel at wildly different things.
- riffraff 6y ago
  > It's quite good compared to ink at simulating objects with a lot of metadata can you give an example? I have zero familiarity with IF programming, but I would be very interested in understanding this.
  - gHx8 6y ago
    In inform7, you can do this: > A race is a kind of person. Dwarf, elf, and half-elf are kinds of race. > A town has numbers called friendliness, services, comfort, and population. Leadership relates a person to a town. The verb to lead implies the leadership relation. "F [friendliness] / S [services] / C [comfort] / P [population]". > Rivalry relates various towns to each other. The verb to be rivals with implies the rivalry relation. The verb to be rivals of implies the rivalry relation. Then you can make a town like this: > Bremen is a town in Ten-Towns. "Founded by dwarf prospectors, the sleepy town of Bremen sits on the west bank of Maer Dualdon, at the mouth of the Shaengarne River.". It has friendliness 3. It has services 1. It has comfort 2. It has population 150. > Dorbulgruf Shalescar is a dwarf. Bremen is led by Dorbulgruf Shalescar. And now inform7 can be used to query or act on all this metadata: > Every turn when the player is in a town: repeat with town running through towns: say "Rivals of [town]: [list of towns that are rivals with town][line break]"; This is the kind of thing you have to work hard to represent in ink because you only have functions, variables, and lists (a hashmap<variable, boolean>). As you add more metadata to inform7, it can make EXTREMELY sophisticated queries or conditions like "list of weapons that were in hidden rooms which are gilded". So for very little work, you can have inform7 reason about whether a player can 'wear' a specific item by checking what they're wearing, how the item affixes to things, and what attachment points you've defined (which can be as broad or granular as you want). And as a bonus, it's also very little code to comment on the player wearing a strange thing (like pants on their head) or wearing colours a specific character thinks clash with eachother. This kind of query is one of ink's notable weaknesses (and requires quite a lot of lists or very clever lookup functions to achieve). But, ink can leverage its frontend (often a general purpose programming language like C# or javascript) to provide that functionality.

I haven't played with either of them much, but they seem to take two fundamentally different narrative approaches. Inform is primarily simulation driven: You describe a world model. Every user input translates into some action that affects the world, and the world changing produces relevant output. Ink is primarily narrative driven: You write the text as a branching story, with a set of explicit options for each branching point. Variables can be read and changed arbitrarily, but have no meaning other than how the narrative uses them.

Multicomp 6y ago

Inform 7 is used to make Zork-style games. GET covid. GO WEST etc. Ink is more comparable to Branching narrative software like Twine, or Visual Novel software like Ren'Py.

irrational 6y ago
I am familiar with inform and zork (which auto-corrects to dork ;-) but not with how that is different than branching narrative software. How are they different or similar?
- megameter 6y ago
  Branching narratives are like Choose Your Own Adventure books. You can get 80% of the way to what Ink does with a carefully programmed static website. But this is an environment designed to author that, and to publish to game engines as well. The main competition is Twine, which is more focused on a self-contained deployment. Twine also got a huge update recently with its "Harlowe" theme supporting storylets - scenes that trigger from a pool or "deck" based on logic you program.
- jccalhoun 6y ago
  zork and other "parser" games would say something "you are in a room with a table and a door to the north" and there would be a cursor. Twine and "choice" games would say something like "you are in a room with a table and a door to the north. Do you want to look at the table or go to the door?"
  - irrational 6y ago
    I see. So the one is a puzzle or game and the other is a choose-your-own-adventure story.
anthk 6y ago
You can omit "GO", the parser will understand "west" fine. Also, Inform6 is better suited for a "logical old-school" programmer than if7, where using it for non-English languages can be a huge mess.

Kinrany 6y ago

On the software side, ink is open source and has C# and JavaScript compilers, a Unity plugin and a separate IDE called inky. Inform7 is not open source yet, although they had plans in 2019. As far as I can tell, it's a single app that outputs its own format that can be uploaded to https://www.ifarchive.org/ https://www.ifarchive.org/ Disclaimer: I've never used either, ink just seemed more legible.

skybrian 6y ago
To add some detail, Inform 7 compiles to reasonably well-documented portable binary formats that have been standardized for decades, with the earliest versions dating back to Infocom days. There are a variety of emulators, including web-based. This is why games uploaded to ifarchive many years ago still work. Even if an old game’s source were available, they were sometimes written in obscure genre-specific programming languages that nobody uses anymore. The binary formats are specific to the genre, which is pretty niche. Casual users are unlikely to have downloaded an emulator even if it’s easy to do, so a game will be bundled with one when it’s published to an app store. But as formats go, it seems like a pretty remarkable success story for the long-term preservation of games, and it would be neat if there were a similar file format that were more general-purpose and more popular, much like we have for images, music, and video.

gHx8 6y ago

Because ink is a type of markup language, using it to write narrative is very easy. You're writing the script for your game and ink will handle how parts of it connect to eachother. It is also very portable owing to being plaintext with relatively simple syntax. There are currently ports of it in both Unity and Unreal, and many developers have used it in some capacity for html/css/javascript games. Procedural generation can be done in ink, however you may need to use the frontend language to save them for later; ink does procedural text very well but has a weak concept of objects. Inform7 is a declarative programming language with english-like syntax. It's quite good compared to ink at simulating objects with a lot of metadata. However, the runtime isn't quite as portable as ink; as a result, Inform7 has no easily located Unity or Unreal packages. Ordinarily, I would recommend Inform7 where you need to process lots of content and randomly generate things. But it seems in addition to having an arbitrary runtime entity limit of 1000 things, those things must exist before you randomize them. Although counterintuitive, procedural generation is more challenging in Inform7 than ink! Use Inform7 when you need a language that can reason "because Alice's relation to Bob is at -50, Alice hates Bob. Because she hates Bob and he is walking nearby, she can trip him. If she does, he will take a random amount of damage and Bob's relation to Alice is reduced by 20." Use ink when you need a highly portable language that can script /other/ frontend frameworks or languages. Ink has been used in 2d games, 3d games (notably Heaven's Vault), on the web, and on three different game engines (Unity, Unreal, Godot). Ink is also very good at making variations on text and tracking how often parts of the story have been visited. They're both excellent tools for interactive fiction, but they excel at wildly different things.

riffraff 6y ago
> It's quite good compared to ink at simulating objects with a lot of metadata can you give an example? I have zero familiarity with IF programming, but I would be very interested in understanding this.
- gHx8 6y ago
  In inform7, you can do this: > A race is a kind of person. Dwarf, elf, and half-elf are kinds of race. > A town has numbers called friendliness, services, comfort, and population. Leadership relates a person to a town. The verb to lead implies the leadership relation. "F [friendliness] / S [services] / C [comfort] / P [population]". > Rivalry relates various towns to each other. The verb to be rivals with implies the rivalry relation. The verb to be rivals of implies the rivalry relation. Then you can make a town like this: > Bremen is a town in Ten-Towns. "Founded by dwarf prospectors, the sleepy town of Bremen sits on the west bank of Maer Dualdon, at the mouth of the Shaengarne River.". It has friendliness 3. It has services 1. It has comfort 2. It has population 150. > Dorbulgruf Shalescar is a dwarf. Bremen is led by Dorbulgruf Shalescar. And now inform7 can be used to query or act on all this metadata: > Every turn when the player is in a town: repeat with town running through towns: say "Rivals of [town]: [list of towns that are rivals with town][line break]"; This is the kind of thing you have to work hard to represent in ink because you only have functions, variables, and lists (a hashmap<variable, boolean>). As you add more metadata to inform7, it can make EXTREMELY sophisticated queries or conditions like "list of weapons that were in hidden rooms which are gilded". So for very little work, you can have inform7 reason about whether a player can 'wear' a specific item by checking what they're wearing, how the item affixes to things, and what attachment points you've defined (which can be as broad or granular as you want). And as a bonus, it's also very little code to comment on the player wearing a strange thing (like pants on their head) or wearing colours a specific character thinks clash with eachother. This kind of query is one of ink's notable weaknesses (and requires quite a lot of lists or very clever lookup functions to achieve). But, ink can leverage its frontend (often a general purpose programming language like C# or javascript) to provide that functionality.