Release notes for Inform v4.3 (build 4W37)

This release was made on 27 July 2007, 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.

Overview

This build adds 21 new examples and provides miscellaneous new features. Chief among these are substantial improvements to the parsing of names: nouns can now be recognized by their number or unit properties, and also by their relations, so that 'Understand "bottle of [something related by containment]" as the bottle' will parse BOTTLE OF SAND if and only if the sand is contained in the bottle. We have also made a tentative beginning on support for sound effects to match the existing support for illustrations. As usual a number of bugs are fixed, and although a few issues still remain (the current tally of open issues stands at 13, as compared with a peak of about 330 earlier this year) none are severe and most users seem to find that Inform is fairly reliable, so recent effort has gone into advancing the language rather than maintaining the compiler.

Language

The kind "player-character" has been abolished. Previously, this was a kind of person able to be the player's persona in the model world: for most games, there was only one player-character in existence, the one automatically created by Inform and called "yourself". From this point onwards, any "person" can be the player, and indeed "player" is now a person variable, not a player-character variable. This means that the player object can now be any man, woman or animal in the source text, and these can be switched between freely in play. Moreover, we can much more simply specify who the protagonist is:
```
	Lord Bowler is a man in the Pavilion. The player is Lord Bowler.
```
If we do not specify the player's identity, the "yourself" is still created and used as before. This change will affect only works which create "player-characters" in their source text: to adapt them to work again, it should be enough simply to change every usage of the kind name "player-character" to "person", "man", "woman" or "animal" as appropriate. This change implements proposal (6.56) from the January 2007 consultation document.
Up to now, all scenes have been able to take place many times: if a scene ends, and then later on its starting conditions once again hold, then it will start all over again. This is sometimes very useful, but also a source of confusion, and it has led to people writing "S begins when ... for the first time" over and over to stop S from recurring. As from this build, a scene can be declared either as recurring or not when it is first created. So for instance:
```
	Hourly Patrol is a recurring scene.
	Apocalyptic End is a scene.
```
makes one of each kind of scene. (An ordinary scene can also be declared as a "non-recurring scene" for clarity's sake.) Note that any scene declared as just "scene", and in particular any scene declared in source text for previous builds of Inform, is now non-recurring: so if you need a scene to recur in a work-in-progress, you need to insert the word "recurring" into its definition. This change implements proposal (6.52) from the January 2007 consultation document, though in a slightly different way from that proposed.
Partial sound support has been added to Inform: see the new sections 19.6 and 19.7 of the documentation. As with picture support, Inform provides the groundwork and leaves it for more sophisticated extensions to go into more elaborate facilities. The present state of completion is that Inform can, on all platforms, read Ogg Vorbis or AIFF sound files from the Materials/Sounds folder for a project, and embed them correctly into a Blorbed Glulx story file, compiling correct code for the Glulx machine to play the sounds back at the appropriate moment. However, these sounds will only be audible in Windows Inform, or when playing a released Glulx story file in Windows Glulxe or Spatterlight for OS X: Glulx support for sound has been implemented in the glulx interpreter used in both Inform and Zoom for OS X, so that placeholder text is printed instead. Sound support was proposal (6.61) from the January 2007 document.
Up to now, the only properties which could be used as part of an object's name for parsing purposes were either/or properties and enumerated named properties. This restriction has been almost completely lifted: we can now understand properties whose kind is number, time, or a unit. For example:
```
	An aspect ratio is a kind of value. 16:9 specifies an aspect ratio.
	A television is a kind of thing. A television has an aspect ratio.
	The widescreen TV is a television in the Office. The fifties TV is
	a television in the Office. The widescreen TV is 16:9. The fifties
	TV is 4:3. Understand the aspect ratio property as referring to
	a television.
```
...allows us to type EXAMINE 16:9 TV, for instance. In addition, further grammar used to specify unusual values is now recognised in such situations: for instance if we wrote...
```
	Understand "European standard" as 16:9.
```
the EXAMINE EUROPEAN STANDARD TV would also work. (Previously this did not work, because the implementation was incomplete.) Finally, a problem message has been added for the (now fairly few) cases where the property still does have a kind which cannot be parsed: previously no problem was issued in cases Inform could not handle, and the feature simply did not work. (This change did not appear in the January document, but has been much requested since.)
A new form of grammar token has been added to enable names of objects (and rooms) to include names of other objects (and rooms) related to them. For instance, if we write:
```
	A box is a kind of container. Understand "box of [something related
	by containment]" as a box. The Toyshop is a room. The red box is a
	box in the Toyshop. Some crayons are in the red box.
```
then TAKE BOX OF CRAYONS will work, because CRAYONS matches against "[something related by containment]" for the red box - or it does for as long as the crayons are there. We can have similar matches against relations of all kinds, but have to name the relation explicitly, using its one-word name. We can also reverse the sense:
```
	A box is a kind of container. Understand "box in [something related
	by reversed containment]" as a box. The Toyshop is a room. The crate
	and the hammock are in the Toyshop. In the crate is a box. In the
	hammock is a box.
```
makes TAKE THE BOX IN THE HAMMOCK work. (Where more than one object matches the criterion, for instance if the original box contained both crayons and chalk, any of the names can be used.)
Inform normally decides whether an object has a singular or plural name, or whether it has a proper name, by looking at how it is first introduced. This mainly works well, but people have also asked for more explicit control, especially to cope with changes in an object during play. Accordingly, there are now two new either/or properties for all things:
```
	A thing can be plural-named or singular-named.
	A thing can be proper-named or improper-named.
```
This change implements proposal (6.46) from the January 2007 document.
The phrase for changing the exits of a room can now accept "nothing" or, equivalently, "nowhere" as the new exit, thus allowing map connections to be explicitly deleted in play. For instance:
```
	change the east exit of Stage to nowhere;
```
Bugs in type-checking to do with the handling of "nothing" have been removed.
Some authors have recently asked for the facility to make extensions go uncredited in the VERSION command output, since this might give away story details, or generally produce verbosely self-laudatory output. A new "authorial modesty" use option has been created for this purpose. Inform has to tread a careful line here, because people make extensions available under a Creative Commons licence which requires that they be credited: so you can only be modest about your own work. If the sentence:
```
	Use authorial modesty.
```
is found in an extension, then its credit line is omitted from the VERSION output of any game using it. If the same sentence is found in the main source text of a work, then credits are omitted for every extension with the same author's name as the work itself. (In other words, it credits everyone else's extensions, but suppresses mention of your own.) The "say" phrase "[list of extension credits]" uses the same convention, but the new "say" phrase:
```
	"[complete list of extension credits]"
```
ignores all these efforts at modesty and prints the whole list. (An otherwise modest author might want to print this posthumously after the end of play, for instance, or in response to a secret debugging command.)
The the ambient odour rule, the ambient sound rule and the block vaguely going rule now apply to actions by all actors, not just the player, so that (for instance) the command XERXES, LISTEN will be read as a request to listen to the ambient location, rather than printing out a parseresque objection such as "What do you want Xerxes to listen to?"
The grammar "switch on [something]" has been added to the standard rules, and has the same effect as "switch [something] on". This is more consistent with switching off.
The maximum length for an extension rubric has been increased from 250 to 500 characters. (Rubrics exceeding that length are silently truncated in extension documentation.)
It is now allowed to create a temporary value (i.e., a local variable) with "let" whose name coincides with that of a thing, room or property. Previously this triggered problem messages, and was a particular problem for extensions and the Standard Rules, which had to avoid "let" names that might hit any of the things created by the user. (For instance, several people reported it as a bug that creating a property called "target" caused problems - this was because the Standard Rules use a "let" variable called "target" in places.)
The resolution of noun phrases has been slightly changed so that a single-word kind of value name will take precedence over the name of a thing or room in an assertion sentence. For instance:
```
	The scene script is in the wardrobe.
	Grand Finale is a scene.
```
would previously have read "scene" as a reference to the scene script, a physical thing, not the kind of value "scene". (This in practice makes it easier to have rooms and things whose names include the names of kinds such as "number", "time" and so on.)

Documentation, examples and extensions

Examples

"Lanista" parts 1 and 2 added to demonstrate randomized combat, first in a simple form and then with weaponry and an ATTACKING IT WITH action
"Night and Day" added to demonstrate recurring sequences of scenes
"Candy" added to demonstrate making a randomly selected item poisonous
"Puff of Orange Smoke" added to demonstrate redirecting all actions from one object to another
"Disappointment Bay" examples changed to the more geographically accurate Disenchantment Bay; typo fixed in the final, finished example
"Entrapment" modified to correct a bug due to changed handling of actions in recent releases of Inform
"Terror of the Sierra Madre", which demonstrates player-switching, greatly simplified as a result of the abolition of player-character
"Exit Strategy", demonstrating how to set up non-recurring scenes, removed (since all scenes are now non-recurring unless otherwise stated)
"Pine 3", "Pine 4", "The Prague Job", and "Space Patrol" modified to reflect the usage of "recurring" scenes
"Snip" modified to remove bugs and make use of the new ability to understand unit properties; "Snip Snip" withdrawn, as the hack it demonstrates is no longer needed and the same functionality was achieved instead by a single line added to "Snip"
"Totality" (example about scheduling an eclipse) given a "test me" script, and a syntax bug removed
"Dinner is Served" revised to work better when the object reached for is the second noun rather than the noun, and also to have less cryptic syntax; the test for the example has been extended
"Tilt" added to demonstrate an implementation of a deck of cards using individual card objects, in which ranks and suits of cards are automatically parsed
"Tilt 2" added to demonstrate an implementation of poker hands, where the cards in a player's inventory are described according to their value; illustrates use of a complex rulebook
"Tilt 3" added to demonstrate use of text colors to make poker suit symbols appear in red, under both Glulx and the Z-machine
"Aspect" added to demonstrate the automatic parsing of unit properties
"Channel" added to demonstrate the automatic parsing of number properties
"Channel 2" added to demonstrate a combination of advanced parsing features, in the creation of tunable televisions
"Cheese-makers" added to demonstrate a TALK TO action tied to a scene-structured plot
"Alias" added to demonstrate telephone-number-sized units functioning under Glulx
"Claims Adjustment" added to demonstrate a camera that produces instant photographs of things; the photographs can then be referred to as in X PHOTOGRAPH OF APPLE
"Puncak Jaya" added to demonstrate characters who can be referred to in their absence
"Cinco" added to demonstrate containers referred to by their contents
"Originals" added to demonstrate disambiguating objects from models of those objects
"Removal" simplified to use action variables rather than the more complicated source
"Gopher-wood" added to demonstrate the use of the proper-named attribute to change someone's name during play
"Carnivale" added to demonstrate the simple scoping case of a large object that should be visible from other rooms
"Rock Garden" added to demonstrate the simple scoping case of multiple rooms that can see into one another (as opposed to the rather more complex "Stately Gardens" which autogenerates a lot of room description as well)
"Latin Lessons" added to demonstrate supplying a missing noun when the action is being performed by someone other than the player
"Uber-Complete Clavier" (the big Unicode test) slightly changed so that it can now be compiled for Glulx as well as the Z-machine
Paragraph breaking adjusted in "In Fire or in Flood", "Misadventure", "Goat-Cheese and Sage Chicken", "Owen's Law"
Minor typos removed from "Wight", "Alpaca Farm", "Apples"

Extensions

"Glulx Text Effects" modified to make it easier to set custom colors for text in Glulx; this appropriates the color-management source from the extension "Simple Graphical Window" by Emily Short, so those using Simple Graphical Window should update to version 4 of the extension in order to avoid overlap. Advanced to version 2.
"Punctuation Removal" revised to include a phrase that corrects instances of "mr.", "mrs.", etc., to "mr", "mrs", and the like, to get around parsing frustrations commonly encountered with these titles. Also added the means to remove apostrophes as well as the other punctuation marks; example added for parsing such phrases as "Jack's tie" if and only if Jack is currently wearing the tie object. Version number advanced to 3.
A bug fixed in "Complex Listing to deal with the marking of regions"; version number advanced to version 5.
Bug fixed in the screen-width-determining routine of "Basic Screen Effects".

Bug fixes

Bug fixed whereby past tense conditions in the form "in ... for the first time" would sometimes have the temporal requirement ignored, particular in the preambles to rules like: Every turn when in the Hall of Mists for the first time;
Bug fixed whereby rules which depend on action taking place at the same time as a compound condition would sometimes produce spurious problem messages: for instance, Check turning the dial to when the number understood < 0 or the number understood > 99: ...is valid but generated a problem message in 4U67.
Bug fixed whereby "otherwise if ... begin" (which is incorrect since otherwise if divides the existing code block, rather than beginning a new one) led to I6 errors rather than a problem message.
Bug fixed whereby using "(called ...)" to create temporary named values at a time in the past such that they could not survive to the present would lead to I6 errors rather than a problem message.
Bug fixed whereby rules taking effect if "doing something to ..." and some description would sometimes false take effect when the action took a non-object as its noun, when the value which happened to have been typed coincided with the internal object number of an item matching the description.
Bug fixed whereby changing player to someone else and then back again, and then using the short name of the player, would crash both the Z and Glulx virtual machines at run-time.
Bug fixed whereby I7 would crash if told to understand empty text as something. (This is not allowed, and a problem message has been added.)
Bug fixed whereby scenes predicated on past tense actions ("Mayhem begins when we have waited") would cause an internal error.
Bug fixed whereby the condition "we have taken inventory" gave false positives after the first turn.
Bug fixed whereby nameless variables attached to activities gave internal errors rather than a problem message.
Bug fixed whereby creating an object called "nowhere" caused a crash rather than a problem message.
Bug fixed whereby grammar introducting alternative textual names for numbers (e.g. 'Understand "a/b/c" as 2.') could lead to I6 errors.
Bug fixed whereby vaguely named properties in adjective definitions would result in internal errors rather than a problem message.
Bug fixed whereby naming actions which happen to include "with" can create spurious out-of-play things (doing no harm, but doing no good either): for instance, "Unlocking the box with the key is bizarre behaviour." would create an object called "Unlocking the box", in addition to doing what it was supposed to do.
Bug fixed whereby matching the player's command against text rather than a topic would cause an interpreter crash at run-time.
Bug fixed whereby verbs defined as auxiliaries required participles to be named unnecessarily, contrary to the documentation: thus "The verb to be able to approach implies the approachability relation." would fail for no good reason.
A bug introduced by the actions rewrite in 4U65 caused player's holdall objects not to work properly if they were being worn rather than carried (as in the documentation's example "Sackcloth"). This is fixed: apologies.
In past builds the grammar token "[a number]", in Understand sentences, has required the number in question to be something which can be stored in a signed 16-bit variable, that is, to be between -32768 and 32767. This is correct for story files running on all versions of the Z-machine, but the Glulx virtual machine has 32-bit variables, so for Glulx the restriction is unnecessary. It has now been lifted: thus on Glulx, we can parse numbers in the range -2147483648 to 2147483647 inclusive.
The Inform 6 debugging verb DAEMONS (aka TIMERS), which is undocumented and meaningless in I7 since this lacks either daemons or timers in the crude I6 sense, could under some circumstances crash if tried in an I7 game. The verb is now removed altogether.

Windows app

All tabs (save the settings tab) have a row of buttons at the top of the tab, allowing navigation and access to common functionality, similar to the OS X application.
Fixed a bug preventing the installation of an extension with brackets in its name.
Added support for multiple windows to the game tab. Any combination of text, grid and graphics windows can be opened by a game running within the application.
Added support for graphics windows to the game tab. As a result, games using Emily Short's "Simple Graphical Window" and "Location Images" extensions will now work when run within the application.
Added support for timer events to the game tab. Combined with the above, games using the "Graphical Window Animation" extension will now work when run within the application.
If saving a project fails, the application now shows an error message. If the project was being saved as part of being closed, then after the error you get a chance to save to a different place.

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