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31 lines
2.7 KiB
HTML
31 lines
2.7 KiB
HTML
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
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<html>
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<head>
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<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
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<link href="indoc_WI.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
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<title>New To Inform?</title>
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</head>
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<body class="paper papertint">
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<!-- START IGNORE -->
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<p class="sectionheading">New To Inform?</p>
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<p>Inform is both an application and a language for creating text-based interactive stories. Interactive fiction is an art form which evolved out of the adventure games of the 1970s, in the same way that today's graphic novels evolved out of the newspaper cartoons of the 1930s. Inform has been the design tool of choice for many, indeed most, of the world's leading writers in this genre since 1993, and is also widely used in education at a variety of levels. It's completely free, even when used to create commercial works. Thanks for downloading this copy, and we hope you'll enjoy it.</p>
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<p>As you've seen, the app begins with a launcher panel. (Bring it back or remove it by typing ⌘L.) You might like to try clicking Onyx, the smallest of the samples, under the "Open a Sample Project" list: it's a very short Russian folk-tale. Inform will ask you to choose somewhere on disc to store it, and then make a copy there. You can play with this and alter it freely, then throw it away when you're done: it's just a copy.</p>
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<p>You can have several Inform projects open at once, but each one lives in a single window which is divided in half. The left and right sides are called "panes" and you can choose what's shown in them with the side tabs: it starts out as Source on the left, Documentation on the right. (From the Launcher, you can also save out a copy of the documentation as an EPUB file to read in iBooks on Mac OS 10.9 or later, or on an iPad.)</p>
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<p>Inform "translates" the instructions in the Source into a playable story. To see that in action, click the Go button for the Onyx project. You'll have to wait just a moment - an Inform project is a surprisingly complicated thing to make, even when the instructions look short - but then the Story pane will open, and you can type in commands as if you were the player. If you're not sure what to type, try </p>
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<blockquote class="code"><p class="quoted">
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TEST ME
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</p></blockquote>
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<p>which makes it show what it can do.</p>
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<p>The Launcher also offers a larger sample project called "Disenchantment Bay", a story about a boat trip in Alaska. Beyond that, there are around 450 Examples in the Documentation, and by clicking on the "save as project" icon you can get playable versions of all of those, too.</p>
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</p>
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<!-- END IGNORE -->
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</body>
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</html>
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