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Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction

inform7.com

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Re: Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction

#2

Post by hackuser »

From their site:

Inform is a design system for interactive fiction based on natural language. It is a radical reinvention of the way interactive fiction is designed, guided by contemporary work in semantics and by the practical experience of some of the world's best-known writers of IF.

Inform's source reads like English sentences, making it uniquely accessible to non-programmers. It's very easy to get started. Watch a screencast.

Also of interest:

Inform's first website was a single hand-coded HTML page in the primitive, 10,000-site Web of 1995. Today the Web has a hundred million sites, and we're larger and better too.

Re: Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction

#3

Post by smoyer »

I've been playing with this for a while and, while I don't have any games released, I continue to be in love with this genre. I'm one of those people that has a real mental picture of what I read (frequently better than what movies portray).

There's a huge community of IF fans and producers which really runs more out of love than profit. There's also an archive where you can download a lot of games (or even play them on-line). Check out http://www.ifarchive.org/.

Re: Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction

#4

Post by brudgers »

smoyer wrote: post #3

I've been playing with this for a while and, while I don't have any games released, I continue to be in love with this genre. I'm one of those people that has a real mental picture of what I read (frequently better than what movies portray). There's a huge community of IF fans and producers which really runs more out of love than profit. There's also an archive where you can download a lot of games (or even play them…

To me, the language is interesting because it could be used for other things...or to put it a different way interactive fiction seems a useful design abstraction for other real world tasks.

What would it mean to wire inform up to arbitrary hardware as a primary user interface?

Re: Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction

#7

Post by pconner »

I took a very non-traditional English class my freshman year of college, and we had an assignment that required us to use this language. From a traditional programming standpoint, I found this platform very difficult to use, though I was never really got too deep into what it was capable of.

Re: Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction

#10

Post by derfj »

jdeisenberg wrote: post #6

Sadly, the links to the manuals from this page http://inform7.com/learn/manuals/ are broken.

Not ideal, but if you don't want to download versions lower on the manual page:

http://web.archive.org/web/20140629075749/http://inform7.com...

http://web.archive.org/web/20140701035008/http://inform7.com...

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