Materials Folder

Every project has a ".materials" folder, which is always stored next to it on disc. (Use ⌘M to show the current project's .materials in the Finder.) This screenshot shows how the .materials folder would look for a project which used it in every possible way. In practice, this is very unlikely.

Project (1) and .materials folder (2) live side by side in the Finder: everything else here is inside .materials (2). The author of this story decided that it should be given to players along with a PDF booklet (3), by including this Release instruction in the source text:

Release along with a file of "A Guide to Arboreal Fauna" called "A Guide to Arboreal Fauna.pdf".

Every released project needs cover art. Authors have to provide two files, full-sized at 960 by 960 (4) and reduced at 120 by 120 (18): they can either be "Cover.jpg" and "Small Cover.jpg" or "Cover.png" and "Small Cover.png".

Extensions to Inform are usually centrally installed, and available to all projects. But this project has its own private copy of "Feeding Squirrels by Emily Short" (7), in its own private Extensions folder (5). This would override any installed copy of the same extension. It has to have the correct name and .i7x ending, and it has to live inside a folder with its author's name (6).

Projects which include pictures as well as text need to store the necessary images, in JPEG or PNG format, in the Figures folder (8). This one was declared in the source text like so:

Figure of Red Admiral Butterfly is the file "butterfly.jpg".

Sound effects are similar, use AIFF or OGG format, and live in Sounds (19). There's one here (20), declared by:

Sound of Rustling Leaves is the file "Rustling Leaves.aiff".

Projects which read or write files of data as they play should have a Files folder (10) to hold these. This one (11) was declared by:

The File of Nut Storage Locations is called "nutstorage".

Now for some expert-only features which hardly anybody needs in practice. The I6T folder (12) provides extra template files (13), or indeed replacement ones (14), and allows a project to include substantial portions of raw Inform 6 code. The Languages folder (16) is for experimenting with language bundles, a feature still in its early stages. The Templates folder (21) is for providing the project with a non-standard Javascript engine, called an "interpreter", when it's released as a website. Here there's an intepreter called "Experimental" (22) which can be selected by putting this into the source:

Release along with the "Experimental" interpreter.

And that just leaves the Release folder (17). Inform creates this automatically if the project's Release button is clicked, and then writes into it whatever will eventually go out to players. So never store anything permanent here: it's intended to be just a holding area.