I discovered Inform 7 last year and was impressed at the sophisticated platform it provides for writing interactive fiction in semi-natural English. In the 1980s there were plenty of books about writing text adventure games (as they were more widely called then) on home microcomputers, and I learned a lot about programming Acorn computers from Peter Killworth's "How To Write Adventure Games for the BBC Microcomputer Model B and Acorn Electron". So to give Inform 7 a try, I implemented the mini four-room adventure from that book, and wrote a walk-through of how to do it quite neatly with the building blocks of Inform 7 here in case anyone's interested: https://www.eclecticstacks.com/post/mini-adventure-in-inform...
Inform is a programming language for creating interactive fiction
11–20 of 33 posts
Re: Inform is a programming language for creating interactive fiction
#12Inform 7 code is interesting from a conceptual perspective —- “How could we build a programming language that looked like natural language?”
In practice though, I think it ultimately falls into some kind of uncanny valley, where it’s just enough like natural language that it seems like a certain sentence or grammatical construction should work, but it doesn’t.
Re: Inform is a programming language for creating interactive fiction
#13Related: Has anyone tried ChatGPT to generate Inform code? Could be interesting.
Yes, it works well. The first time it misunderstood my query "write a very short story in Inform 7", but after clarifying ("I wanted a short story written as an Inform 7 program"), it wrote me the exact same story but in Inform 7. Not sure if it's because I said "very short", but it basically locked me into a cabin without letting me go anywhere. It did describe a fair amount of objects inside the cabin though.
It would be a real boon for non-programmers if you could build a text adventure game just using text dialogue with a system like that, interactively describing all the locations, objects and interactions.
After that you could of course add AI-generated images, videos, music and voice (TTS).
Re: Inform is a programming language for creating interactive fiction
#14Inform 7 is a work of art and one of the most interesting programming languages out there.
What in particular makes it so compelling?
Re: Inform is a programming language for creating interactive fiction
#15Inform 7 is a work of art and one of the most interesting programming languages out there.
What in particular makes it so compelling?
I tried Inform years ago, and finding Rosetta Code solutions in Inform 6 and 7 intrigued me. The '99 Bottles of Beer' solution was the first I looked at then[1]. This was even after I had played with NLP in the 90s. It seemed right and strange at the same time.
This has been blown away by ChatGPT now!
[1] https://rosettacode.org/wiki/99_bottles_of_beer#Inform_7
Re: Inform is a programming language for creating interactive fiction
#16What are the most popular languages for writing IF? Why would I choose one over another?
If you're a beginner, I can definitely recommend Adventuron to get started very fast.
It has a browser-based IDE and compiler, and gives you a simple portable html file for your game.
Last IF jam we took part in, even veterans in Inform did not have the same level of polish that Adventuron has as default. Some even struggled to get a portable executable at all.
Why would you choose why over another? It's like general programming languages, the design makes trade-offs between expressiveness and simplicity, makes one approach more canonical than the others (e.g. in state management, choice between focusing on transition or locus, etc).
Re: Inform is a programming language for creating interactive fiction
#17Inform 7 code is interesting from a conceptual perspective —- “How could we build a programming language that looked like natural language?” In practice though, I think it ultimately falls into some kind of uncanny valley, where it’s just enough like natural language that it seems like a certain sentence or grammatical construction should work, but it doesn’t.
There's a popular programming language for writing Minecraft plugins in called "Skript", it also looks like "natural language" and I find it jarring to use.
Re: Inform is a programming language for creating interactive fiction
#18Inform 7 code is interesting from a conceptual perspective —- “How could we build a programming language that looked like natural language?” In practice though, I think it ultimately falls into some kind of uncanny valley, where it’s just enough like natural language that it seems like a certain sentence or grammatical construction should work, but it doesn’t.
> some kind of uncanny valley, where it’s just enough like natural language that it seems like a certain sentence or grammatical construction should work, but it doesn’t.
Luckily, the target audience of Inform are people who like adventure games (people who are used to playing "guess the verb").
Re: Inform is a programming language for creating interactive fiction
#19Inform 7 is a work of art and one of the most interesting programming languages out there.
What in particular makes it so compelling?
Re: Inform is a programming language for creating interactive fiction
#20Related: Has anyone tried ChatGPT to generate Inform code? Could be interesting.
I’m much more interested in how a language model could be leveraged by an interactive fiction language. Obviously there is a lot of potential, but integration of scripted rule based logic with a machine learned logic has always been difficult.