inform7/resources/Changes/Change Logs/4K40.txt

4K41 (23 January 2007)

4K40 contained a bug making it unreliable under Mac OS X on G4 or G5
	processors: 4K41 is believed to fix this, with our apologies for the
	inconvenience. In all other respects it is identical to 4K40 and
	Mac OS X users with Intel processors need not download again.

4K40 (23 January 2007)

(Mac OS X only) The Skein's appearance has been redesigned, and an illustrated
	tutorial to the new-look Skein now appears as section 1.8 of the
	documentation for the OS X application. (We hope that similar changes
	will be made shortly in the Windows application.)
(Mac OS X only) The Skein panel now has a Layout... button for customising
	the width and height proportions of the skein display.
(Windows only) Documentation links from the Index tab now work with Internet
	Explorer 7.
(Windows only) The size, italic, text colour and background colour style hints
	are now supported when running a Glulx game in the game tab.
New activities "clarifying the parser's choice of something" and "asking
	which do you mean" allow customisation of the familiar messages:
		(the mahogany inlaid box)
	and
		Which do you mean, the mahogany inlaid box or the icebox?
Extensions:
	Punctuation Removal made bi-platform (and version number advanced to 2).
	Version 4 of Plurality by Emily Short now responds correctly to
		male/female settings even if the items in question are not of the
		man/woman kind, and adds several further tokens.
Examples:
	Magneto's Revenge fixed to use "the person reaching" rather than "the
		person asked".
	Changes to Waning Moon, Air Conditioning is Standard, and Fifty Times
		Fifty Ways to correct typos.
	Veronica added to demonstrate leaving a region.
	Numberless added to demonstrate two ways to emulate a switch statement.
	Pine4 given a tiny fix to make its articles behave better.
The rules for the sorting of grammar lines in the grammar for command verbs
	have been slightly changed. Few users should notice any difference, but
	one change means that grammar added to cover "mistakes" should now no
	longer be able to "mask" grammar for non-mistaken commands, something
	which had been reported previously as a bug.
Problem message added for attempting to use "Understand the command ... as
	... when ...", where some condition follows the "when": this has never
	been supported, but in previous builds the "when" clause was silently
	ignored.
Problem message added for attempting to use the "[text]" token in a
	table entry or a ... matches ... condition, where it is not allowed.
A new rule called the "very unlikely to mean taking what's already carried
	rule" improves the parser's handling of TAKE SPLODGE when there are
	several splodges in different places, some of them carried.
Blue "help" icon added to "Does the player mean..." in the Rules index.
A long-standing bug fixed whereby things introduced without an article would
	sometimes be given one, rather than being consider proper nouns (or mass
	nouns): for instance, in "The player carries a small key, a tent, and
	Variety Magazine.", the source text clearly suggests that Variety
	Magazine is a proper noun, and I7 now recognises this.
Two bugs fixed to do with "when..." clauses attached to rules in unusual
	situations - both bugs having appeared only in 4F59. One related to
	rules in the form "check A when B", where A is an action including
	the word "it" (such as "telling it about") and B a condition; the
	other to "when" clauses attached to object-based rulebooks known never
	to run during activities, notably the reaching inside rules. In each
	case spurious problem messages were generated.
Bug fixed so that things are no longer "lockable" by default. (Instead,
	locked containers and locked doors are lockable by default.)
Bug fixed whereby an instruction like "Understand "[any actor]" as James
	Bond." would generate I6 code failing to compile through I6.
Bug fixed whereby one token to match an object making use of another one
	would sometimes find the result corrupted: for instance,
		Understand "leg of [person]" as a leg.
	would get confused between the leg and the person whose leg it is said
	to be.
Bug fixed whereby some combinations of name words and tokens to match the
	names of objects did not work.
Bug fixed whereby meaningless text would sometimes match a "[number]" token
	when parsing. Moreover, "[number]" has been improved so that it now
	matches any literal decimal between -32768 and 32767 inclusive (i.e., the
	full 16-bit range of signed integers supported by the Z-machine) rather
	than duplicating the peculiar behaviour of the I6 number-parser, which
	worked only on non-negative numbers up to 10000.
Bug fixed which caused too many things (and rooms) to have plural forms of
	their names recognised: for instance, a "red chair" would be referrable
	to in the plural as "red chairs" even if it was the only one, and this
	would cause ambiguity if a second object were in the same place and
	with its main singular name coincidentally "chairs". The convention
	now is that an object can be referred to in the plural with a name
	inherited from its kind if and only if it has no name of its own. (This
	change sounds substantial, but in fact did not change the behaviour of
	any of the examples.)
Bug fixed whereby large numbers of identical objects could cause mysterious
	things to happen if ever 64 of them are in the same place at the same
	time. (In fact an I6 library bug: thank due to Martin Bays for his fix,
	which is patch L61125.)
Bug fixed in which two things without names of their own were sometimes
	considered "indistinguishable" by the I6 parser, and therefore grouped
	into a plural (e.g., "six red blocks"), when in fact they were
	distinguishable by virtue of having a visible property which differed
	between the two (e.g., some being red, some being blue).
Bug fixed causing documentation of examples in extensions to have any
	Inform 6 fragments in (- ... -) brackets lose the -). In particular,
	this affected the example in Menus by Emily Short.
A limit on the number of different "in the presence of..." clauses
	allowed in a single source text has been removed. (Previously it stood
	at 100: now there is no limit.)
A limit on the number of different noun- and scope-filtering tokens
	allowed in a single source text has been removed. (Previously it stood
	at 100: now there is no limit.)
A limit on the number of new kinds of value which could be created by a
	single source text has been removed. (Previously it stood at 400: now
	there is no limit.)
Two bugs fixed causing crashes in unlikely circumstances after a problem
	has been encountered.