inform7/resources/Changes/Change Logs/3Z95.txt

3Z95 (14 September 2006)

(Mac OS X only) A new toolbar gadget, Headings, provides a breadcrumb-style
	drop-down menu to navigate the headings and subheadings in the source.
A new toolbar button, Index, (re-)makes the current project, but shows the
	revised index rather than the ensuing game. It's useful when, for
	instance, laying out rooms and map connections, as it allows for an
	easier comparison of the source text with the World map.
A new chapter (Chapter 5: Text) has been created in the documentation: this
	is made up of material previously in the middle of Chapter 4, with a
	variety of sections (on Unicode, quotations, "say" and text substitutions)
	pulled in from surrounding chapters.
More detailed material has been added to the chapter on Rulebooks to cover
	the distinction between object- and action-based rulebooks.
Review sections added to chapters 2, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9.
The unsupported types "object-specification" and "object-specification-unsub"
	have been withdrawn. In all cases where a phrase takes a description of
	a set of objects - for instance as what to list in a "[list of S]",
	or as what to repeat through in a "repeat with X running through S" -
	this is now called simply "description". Moreover, the operations
	"random S", "number of S", "total P of S" and "(superlative) S" -
	such as "number of men", "a random man", "total carrying capacity of
	men", "the heaviest man" - are all now defined as phrases like any other,
	rather than being special constructions inside Inform. (This should ease
	slightly odd problems experienced by a few people where Inform's parser
	could not cope with phrases whose names were too similar to these four
	constructions.) Finally, although "description" is not a kind of value,
	it is legal to use "description" in new phrases:
		To enumerate (collection - a description):
			repeat with the item running through the collection
			begin;
				say "-- [The item].";
			end repeat.
	We could then "enumerate lighted rooms", say. Note that "collection"
	here stands for whatever description is used when the phrase is invoked:
	it can in turn be used wherever a description is needed. We could,
	for instance, evaluate "the total carrying capacity of the collection".
Actions can now require three levels of access to something in order to
	work, rather than two:
	- "Visible" and "touchable" (the default) are as before, and "carried"
	has been added. (E.g., "Assaying is an action applying to one carried
	thing.") Carried implies touchable which implies visible, in this sense.
	- A new accessibility rule, the "carrying requirements rule", checks that
	this requirement is met.
	- Should it fail, a new activity, "implicitly taking something", will
	attempt to have the actor silently take the item(s) required.
	- Should this in turn fail, the action as a whole will fail the "carrying
	requirements rule".
	- In Understand sentences, the tokens "[something held]" and "[things
	held]" have been withdrawn. If used, they now produce an explanatory
	Problem message which lays out what must change. In most cases, what
	will be needed is for the action's declaration to include the carrying
	requirement, and then these tokens to revert to plain "[something]"
	or "[things]"; but new tokens "[something preferably held]" and
	"[things preferably held]" have been created which, though they can
	match anything visible, will prefer items held when ambiguous names
	are used.
	These changes make little difference to the player's perception of what
	is happening. They have two advantages: first, it is conceptually clearer
	for the action to be where realism constraints are declared, rather than
	in grammar for parsing, and it ensures that all grammar using the same
	action follows the same rules; second, it moves implicit taking from the
	I6 library into more modern I7 terms, thus making it much easier to adapt
	and modify the behaviour of implicit taking: this has been a frequent
	request.
The actions "throwing X at Y" and "showing X to Y" now require Y only to
	be visible, not to be touchable. (We envisage daggers thrown across
	chasms, security passes shown through windows, and so forth.)
The "blowing" action, intended for woodwind instruments and perhaps the
	occasional siphon, has been withdrawn from the built-in set: it no
	longer seems to us part of the essential core of actions. We have
	similarly removed praying, digging, jumping over, filling and
	swimming. (Our main concern with these was that, besides being of
	marginal use, they tended to result in inappropriate text being
	produced in the few cases where they were relevant.)
Finally, "remove X" (as distinct from "remove X from Y") is no longer
	understood as referring to the taking action. (It caused confusions
	with removing in the sense of removing an item of clothing, and
	hardly anybody ever used it.)
Further work has been carried out on providing Glulx support. We now
	believe that any work written without the explicit use of Z-code
	assembly language (or extensions themselves containing such) should
	compile, run and release correctly in with "Glulx" selected on the
	Settings panel.
Moreover, there is (as yet limited) support for displaying images, which
	Inform calls "Figures", following an analogy with book conventions. To
	use these:
	- Place an image file, which must be a JPEG or PNG, in a subfolder
		called Figures of the Materials folder for the project. Suppose
		this is "Woodlands.png".
	- Add the sentence:	
			Figure of Woodlands is the file "Woodlands.png".
		to the source text. (Figure names can consist of any text so
		long as they start with the word "Figure": "Figure 3 - Woodlands",
		for instance, or "Figure W" would have been just as good.)
	- The phrase
			display the Figure of Woodlands;
		will now show the image, when the work is compiled to Glulx. When
		compiled to the Z-machine (which is the default setting on the
		Settings panel, of course), nothing will happen: the phrase will
		do nothing. The phrase option
			display the Figure of Woodlands, one time only;
		causes the image to be shown only the first time this phrase is
		reached.
	- A list of figures, with thumbnails and dimensions, appears in the
		Contents index; a warning triangle is shown for any images in the
		wrong format, or which are missing from the Figures folder.
	- When a Glulx work is released as a blorb (the default setting for the
		way releases occur), any such images are automatically included.
	- The new kind of value "figure-name" can be used to define phrases
		which work with Glulx pictures:
			To do something funny with (F - a figure-name): ...
		Figure names compile to resource ID numbers as used in the final
		released blorb; these will usually be integers 2, 3, 4, ...,
		since picture resource number 1 is reserved for the cover art.
	- We would like to thank John Cater for contributing his infglk.h
		definitions to the project: these definitions are included in the
		I6 source code compiled by I7 on any project set to Glulx.
In line with the existing text substitutions "[the Thing]", "[The Thing]",
	"[a Thing]", "[an Entity]", for the name of something together with the
	given article and casing, "[A Thing]" and "[An Entity]" have been added,
	providing for a capitalised indefinite article.
Technically a new feature rather than a bug fix: if an object is established
	as a proper noun, in that its name as specified by "called" does not
	begin with a standard English article - for instance "A man called your
	local vicar is in the Belfry", where "your local vicar" is treated as
	a proper noun - then this name will be capitalised if the object's
	name is printed with "[The whatever]", "A whatever" or "An whatever".
	(Thus "Your local vicar" would be printed instead of "your local vicar".)
Kinds can now have plural names. This will relatively seldom be useful, but
	the result is that the text "A house is a kind of thing. Some windows
	are a kind of thing. Some windows are part of every house." - will now
	result in a house's windows being deemed to have plural names (which for
	instance means they will produce better messages with the Plurality
	extension).
Conversely, fewer plural names are now understood by the run-time parser:
	an over-eagerness to recognise plurals of the names of unique, one-off
	items was sometimes leading to name clashes and consequently misinterpreted
	input.
Examples:
	"Alpaca Farm" -- modified for new held rules
	"Ballpark" -- added commentary to better explain the function of
		the table
	"Beachfront" -- added commentary to explain the order of
		operations of the rules
	"Beneath the Surface" -- modified to account for changes to the
		held token
	"Big Sky Country" -- modified to account for the removal of the
		DIG action
	"Bruneseau's Journey" -- modified for the fact that BLOW has been
		removed
	"Bumping into Walls" -- substantially simplified entire example to
		demonstrate simpler handling of the problem
	"Cloak of Darkness" -- modified for new held rules
	"Crane's Leg 1" and "Crane's Leg 2" -- removed "a thing has a
		thing called the ideal" and replaced this with a relation and some
		discussion of why it is better to use relations than object
		properties
	"Curare" -- added to demonstrate a possible use of descriptions
	"Dig" -- removed, since it showed how to get around a problem that
		is no longer a problem
	"Down Below" -- added a demonstration of >FLIP grammar for the
		light switch, and corrected a bug that would have allowed the
		switch to be interacted-with from rooms other than the basement
	"Lakeside Living" -- modified to account for the removal of the
		swimming action
	"Model Shop" -- added a few extra lines showing how to make
		alternative names for the created buttons
	"Morning After" -- comment added to explain the meaning of "carry
		out"
	"Pine" -- modified to account for the removal of the swimming action
	"Polarity" -- comment added to explain "first carry out going
		rule"
	"Reflections" -- modified to account for the removal of the blowing
		action
	"Revenge of the Fussy Table" -- redundancy removed from one
		definition
	"Space Patrol - Stranded on Jupiter!" -- modified to account for
		the removal of the DIG action
	"Tamed" -- modified also to model the case of a room whose
		exterior is visible in another room (ie, nested locations)
	"3 AM" -- modified to reflect the changes to the held token
	"Trachypachidae Maturin 1803" -- modified to reflect changes in
		the held token
	"Transmutation" -- added example on group relations, thanks to
		Jesse McGrew
	"Under Contract" -- modified for the fact that various actions
		have been removed
	"The Unexamined Life" -- modified to reflect changes in the held
		token
	"A View of Green Hills" -- comment added explaining what noun
		means in this context
	"Waterskin" -- modified to reflect removal of blowing action
	"Would you...?" -- more comment added explaining the behavior of
		edible things
	"Zodiac" -- added missing line to the first version of the
		scenario
	"Zorn of Zorna" -- modified to reflect removal of blowing action
	A new information-only example has been added to the chapter on Rulebooks,
		giving a Backus-Naur form grammar for Inform's rule preambles
Worked Examples:
	"Bronze" -- modified to reflect myriad changes to action definitions
		and held tokens
	"Glass", "When in Rome 1", "When in Rome 2" -- modified to remove a few
		responses to now-undefined actions
	"Damnatio Memoriae" -- modified to reflect changes to held tokens; fixed
		minor bug about thinking on the first turn
	"Reliques of Tolti-Aph" -- modified to reflect action changes
Extensions:
	"Complex Listing" modified to deal with the new specification type, and
		advanced to version 3. Please note that "register things marked for
		listing" is now not necessary in most cases: see the documentation.
The SCENES testing command now summarises the current situation when scene
	tracing is switched on - the story so far, as it were.
Changes in the type-checker should cause Inform to compile slightly more
	efficient code: it also checks a few more cases, and notably that the
	parameters of an action in a "try" phrase are genuinely of the right
	kind of value for the action in question.
Bug fixed in which phrases to decide if something-or-other would sometimes
	not properly be parsed where they naturally begin with "the": so that,
	for instance, the condition "if the action requires a touchable noun..."
	would sometimes fail because of the "the".
Bug fixed to do with spurious paragraphs such as "On the mantelpiece is a
	brass clock." being produced in room descriptions when the mantelpiece
	is scenery, and the brass clock has already been mentioned.
Bug fixed whereby the creation of three things X, Y and Z with text in the
	pattern "an X of Y and a Z" would sometimes cause Z to be created with
	no article, i.e., as if its name were a proper noun - ignoring the "a".
Bug fixed whereby testing if "X is in R", where X is a thing and R is a
	region, would always come up negative even if X was in a room inside
	that region. It now makes the obviously intended test.
Bug fixed to do with incorrect casing when printing a literal value in a
	pattern which includes words already occurring earlier in the source
	with different casing from that in the pattern.
Bug fixed causing programming errors to appear at run-time when attempting
	to push an enterable container between rooms while within it (by
	punting down a river, perhaps).
Bug fixed causing occasional hangs, under Glulx only, when the player
	character in inside or on something and also has component parts.
Bug fixed causing snippet replacement to leave the wrong number of words
	behind, under Glulx only.
(Windows only) Clicking on a link in a problem report that points to an
	extension does not open a new window if the extension is already open in
    another window.
Problem messages added for duplicate definitions of verbs or prepositional
	usages.
Problem messages to do with misphrased property declarations improved.