inform7/notes/release/1-3.md

Release notes for Inform v1.3 (build 3L95)

This release was made on 14 May 2006, before Inform was open-sourced. At that time versions of Inform were identified by build codes in the form NLNN.

This is part of the historical archive of release notes.

Language

• Added the implication that something locked is usually lockable. This in practice means that doors and containers described as being locked at the start of play are considered to be something which the player could in principle lock or unlock, given the correct key. (In the absence of information about that key, the player will still not be able to lock or unlock them, but will get a more realistic reply from the game in response to attempts to unlock.)
• Added "persons" as an alternative plural of "person" (the usual one being "people").
• Fixed nested comments: thus "[This [even so] is all one comment.]"

Documentation, examples and extensions

• Various minor clarifications added to documentation, and new section 3.24 ("Directions") added.
• As the beginnings of a process of adding reviews at the end of each chapter, brief notes are added to the ends of chapters 9 and 10.
• Added two new Examples: "Feline Behavior" and "Panache".
• Minor changes to Examples:
• Being Prepared, Model Shop, Ballpark: added comments.
• Crane's Leg I and Eddystone: modified because of type-checking bug.
• U-Stor-It: fixed bug to do with cards appearing on all of the chests.
• Fussy Table: added understanding of "chair" as a chair.
• Yolk of Gold: rearranged rule order.
• Fixed bug in extension Plurality by Emily Short which involved noticing the plurality of items mentioned by the player but not printed in the text.

Problem messages

• Improved the "hawk is a handsaw" problem message.
• Improved the problem messages for incorrectly specified rules.
• Improved problem messages for "now ..." used with a condition which cannot be directly arranged during play, such as "now Scene IV is happening", and for "now ... and ...".
• Improved problem messages for assertions where it seems possible that the wrong primary verb has been construed.
• Problem message for understand followed by an incorrect action corrected (it was previously recommended as correct usage something which wasn't).
• More explicit problem message for an attempt to create a "part" of a room.
• Added run-time problem message for using the bare condition "in R" where R is neither a room nor a region.

Bug fixes

• Fixed bug whereby an assertion containing three or more consecutive property adjectives ("a red rough square block is on the table") would have only the first two acted upon.
• Fixed bug in which rules whose premiss contained an unrecognised action plus the explicit word "rule" would activate every turn, rather than produce a problem message.
• Fixed bug to do with rules beginning "Check/report/carry out", then an action name including "it", then a conditional clause with "when" or "while".
• Fixed bug in which using a "To say ..." phrase in the middle of a complex say would cause it to lose track of conditional saying, sometimes resulting in both "[if ...]" and "[otherwise]" parts being printed.
• Fixed bug in previous fix for failure to object to names of things or rooms containing literal double-quoted text (which then failed to compile through I6).
• Fixed bug to do with assigning properties to a null object when "it" is currently undefined.
• Fixed bug to do with incorrect sorting of rules as between a rule specifying "going ... in..." and one specifying "going ... from...", where there are at least three such defined in a particular order.
• Fixed bug in which run-time type-checking did not resolve which phrase definition to use where they differed only in properties of objects (for instance, distinguishing "To recite (something - closed container)" and "To recite (something - open container)").
• Fixed bug which very occasionally caused a "bad check-against in run-time type check" internal error.
• Fixed crash if a Table is improperly named (or not named at all), and added checking to enforce the rules on Table names.
• Fixed bug confusing ordinal and cardinal numbers in assertions (so that "The third man is here." would be misread as if "Three men are here.").
• Fixed bug if a region is created whose name begins with a direction or other indication of location ("East of Eden is a region.", say, or "On the Prairie is a region.").
• Fixed crash if a room is created only by implication and with no name.
• Fixed failure of sentences like "East of the Garden is the Gazebo." to establish which room is currently under discussion (the Garden): this meant that some source text in the documentation and website failed.
• Fixed bug in which if pronouns would sometimes be assigned to implicitly created things: for instance, in "A nose is part of every person. ... George is a man. He wears a shirt and a pair of pants.", "he" was incorrectly thought to refer to George's nose rather than George.
• Fixed bug (or arguably added feature) so that named rules can be property values, that is, so that a property can have "rule" as its kind of value.
• Fixed bug in which values that vary, such as "location", were allowed by I7 as table entries, only to fail to compile through I6; and added problem message for the special case of "player".
• Fixed bug in which initialising a value that varies to itself, or to another value that varies, was not reported as a problem, and fell through to fail in I6.
• Fixed bug in which attempts to manipulate the properties of kinds would sometimes not be reported as problems, and fall through to fail in I6.
• Fixed bug in which properties of indefinitely described objects, used as the subjects of verbs, failed to compile in I6.
• Fixed bug in which, in some circumstances, the character "@" used in text failed to compile in I6 (making it hard to write email addresses).
• Fixed bug in which "(called ...)" used improperly in adjective definitions was not reported as a problem, and fell through to I6.
• Fixed bug in which doors described both as one- and two-sided would not be picked up as a problem.
• Fixed bug in which explicitly starting the player in a container which is not contained in any room would fall through to an error in I6.
• Added a very limited ability to cope with "if X has P greater than N", where P is a property, and fixed bug whereby uses of "to have P" resulted in internal errors: those which cannot be compiled now result in better problem messages.

Mac OS X app

• (Mac OS X only) Added a "Prune" button to the skein, with a slider control for the severity of pruning required.
• (Mac OS X only) Added a font size option in the Preferences, affecting all the panels simultaneously.
• (Mac OS X only) Removed the spurious error on the extensions contents page about incorrect extension "Standard Rules.zip".

Windows app

• (Windows only) If compilation fails, index pages from the previous compilation are kept.
• (Windows only) Invalid characters cannot now be entered into the new project name field.
• (Windows only) The File/Revert menu item has been removed, as it was misleading quite a few people.
• (Windows only) Characters input with the AltGr key held down (such as ']' on a Spanish keyboard) can now be entered in the Source and Game panels.
• (Windows only) Inform 6 code is coloured grey in the Source tab.
• (Windows only) The application now works with IE7 installed.
• (Windows only) The installer would sometimes fail to reinstall a new version if the old version was not uninstalled, leading to an incorrect install and two entries in "Add and Remove Programs". This should now be fixed.
• (Windows only) The application should now cope if the "My Documents" path is something like "G:".
• (Windows only) Replace now works if the string being searched for is only a case insensitive match.
• (Windows only) The Source tab now has the standard edit context menu available if you right click on it with the mouse.
• (Windows only) Fixed mis-addressing of the blue "go to documentation" links, which always linked two pages after the one intended.