The Exciting News About I7

What piece of news caused me to literally choke on a biscuit this afternoon?

Why the release of a new version of Inform 7, of course!



Actually, the new version has been out for a little while (six days to be exact) but I've been so consumed with other things that I didn't notice. In case you didn't know, this release of Inform 7 took something like three years to develop, and geeks like me have been checking the I7 site religiously to see if their beloved language has finally released a new version.

I'm very excited to work with the new I7 language. I'm going to have to conjure a new release of the AIF Toolkit to take advantage of I7's delicious, delicious features. Then I'll be working on my Minicomp entry for this year.

So, if you are an author, what can you expect from the new features?

The most important feature for the AIF community is the inclusion of perspective and tense. This was always a weakness of I7 and forced authors to use awkward, unwieldy extensions. No more. Now you can write stories like this:

>GO NORTH
Tom walks north.

>FUCK SANDRA
Tom fucks Sandra.

>POSSESS SANDRA
You become Sandra.

Of course, that's a fairly shitty game, but you get the idea.

The other big weakness of I7 was how library messages are handled. If you use the AIF Toolkit, you'll notice I've built my own way of handling customizable messages since, by default, I7 does a pretty bad job of that. Now customizing default messages are easy and breezy.

There's a lot of other cool technical stuff, such the streamlining of some pretty complex systems. Indexed texts are gone. Real numbers are in. Mountains of bugs are crushed and scattered like dry leaves in autumn.

OK, I'm excited. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to waste an afternoon playing with my new toy.