inform7/notes/release/1-4.md

Release notes for Inform v1.4 (build 3M43)

This release was made on 21 May 2006, before Inform was open-sourced. At that time versions of Inform were identified by build codes in the form NLNN.

This is part of the historical archive of release notes.

Language

• By popular demand (two people asked for this) "now X is not P" is now legal, where P is an either/or property: thus "now the four-poster bed is not scenery", for instance.
• Extended "let" to allow "rule" as one of the kinds of value allowed.
• Changed rules on the ' character so that it is not translated into " when it begins text and is immediately followed by s and a space. (This so that the apostrophe in "[The Kitchen]'s decor is awful." is not converted to a double-quote.)
• Improved behaviour of "called", so that sentences involving relationships with objects which are "called" now work: for instance, "The white door is north of a room called the Hot and Cold Room."
• Unexpectedly capitalised articles following "called" are now no longer read as articles. Thus, "South of the Passageway is a room called The Great Hall of Infinity." will preserve the capitalised "The" in the room's name.
• Adjusted priorities in parsing so that table column names are considered less likely to be intended than kind names. (This affects works where a kind has its instances created by a table, since column 1 of that table will quite likely have the same name as the kind.)
• When things are created by table (as in the example to do with Tour de France jerseys), any articles in front of their names are now recognised, just as if they had been created by regular sentences.

Documentation, examples and extensions

• Fixed example "Pink or Blue" to deal correctly with one-letter inputs.
• Added a few words of explanation to example "Crusoe" to help people find the bit of the action that needs replacing.
• Twelve new Examples added, as straightforward demonstrations:
• "Escape" - the most basic imaginable window.
• "Down Below" - the most basic light switch.
• "Replanting" - changing the results of trying to take an immovable object.
• "Up and Up" - a travel description printed before moving between rooms.
• "Neighborhood Watch" - a door lockable without a key but only on one side.
• "Slightly Wrong" - a room whose description is unusual on the first visit.
• "Laura" - use of a printed name and understand to get around particularly awkward-named objects.
• "Tamed" - enterable containers and supporters and to explain a few details of when we might say something was transparent.
• "Grace" - preventing the player from traveling to a distant location without a vehicle.
• "Verbosity" - using full-length room descriptions.
• "Infiltration" - how to change a room description on each of several visits.
• "MRE" - various timing things, heavily commented.
• Minor changes to examples "Finishing School" and "Lean and Hungry" to address the complaint that general rules were being written but only really made sense for specific individual NPCs.
• Minor changes to "Garibaldi" examples to correct a terrible error (the Medlab being called Sickbay, in violation of the game's nominal setting).
• Typo removed from example "Get Me to the Church on Time".
• Correction of "Hagia Sophia" example to try exiting the chair silently.
• Review sections added to chapters 3 and 17 of the documentation.

Bug fixes

• Fixed crash on "Yourself is nowhere" (sic).
• Fixed crash sometimes occurring in indexing of rulebooks attached to scenes.
• Fixed crash (or sometimes other misbehaviour) on an over-complicated say.
• Fixed compiler hang when complicated assemblies never end.
• Fixed failure to check incorrect usage of 'called' in defining one-to-one relations which are not reciprocated.
• Fixed failure to report improper usages of the (supposedly internal use only!) syntax "...an action corresponding to...".
• Fixed failure to reject matches of vague descriptions against specific ones in type checking, so that (e.g.) "an open door" would be accepted against "(D - a door)" in a phrase definition.
• Fixed a bug in which complicated creations of kinds sometimes ignored their adjectives: e.g., 'A radiant panel is a kind of backdrop which is lit.' would sometimes silently ignore the "lit" part.
• Fixed a bug - well, arguably clarified an ambiguous specification - so that a printed name for a kind is now inherited by things (or rooms) of that kind.
• Restored the (nowhere documented and theoretically unofficial) debugging command RULES to working again.

Windows app

• (Windows only) Search highlighting in the documentation tab doesn't keep applying to further pages as you nagivate around.
• (Windows only) If nothing is found when searching, a dialog appears as feedback.
• (Windows only) Replacing text in the source tab no longer goes into an infinite loop if the new text contains the old text as a substring.
• (Windows only) If the registry string value "HKCU\Software\David Kinder\Inform\Window\Font Name" is set, its value is used as the application font.
• (Windows only) If the registry DWORD value "HKCU\Software\David Kinder\Inform\Window\Font Size" is set, its value is used as the application font point size.