inform7/notes/release/3-2.md

Release notes for Inform v3.2 (build 4K41)

This release was made on 23 January 2007, 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

• New activities "clarifying the parser's choice of something" and "asking which do you mean" allow customisation of the familiar messages: (the mahogany inlaid box) and Which do you mean, the mahogany inlaid box or the icebox?
• The rules for the sorting of grammar lines in the grammar for command verbs have been slightly changed. Few users should notice any difference, but one change means that grammar added to cover "mistakes" should now no longer be able to "mask" grammar for non-mistaken commands, something which had been reported previously as a bug.
• A new rule called the "very unlikely to mean taking what's already carried rule" improves the parser's handling of TAKE SPLODGE when there are several splodges in different places, some of them carried.
• Blue "help" icon added to "Does the player mean..." in the Rules index.

Documentation, examples and extensions

Examples

• Magneto's Revenge fixed to use "the person reaching" rather than "the person asked".
• Changes to Waning Moon, Air Conditioning is Standard, and Fifty Times Fifty Ways to correct typos.
• Veronica added to demonstrate leaving a region.
• Numberless added to demonstrate two ways to emulate a switch statement.
• Pine4 given a tiny fix to make its articles behave better.

Extensions

• Punctuation Removal made bi-platform (and version number advanced to 2).
• Version 4 of Plurality by Emily Short now responds correctly to male/female settings even if the items in question are not of the man/woman kind, and adds several further tokens.

Problem messages

• Problem message added for attempting to use "Understand the command ... as ... when ...", where some condition follows the "when": this has never been supported, but in previous builds the "when" clause was silently ignored.
• Problem message added for attempting to use the "[text]" token in a table entry or a ... matches ... condition, where it is not allowed.

Bug fixes

• A long-standing bug fixed whereby things introduced without an article would sometimes be given one, rather than being consider proper nouns (or mass nouns): for instance, in "The player carries a small key, a tent, and Variety Magazine.", the source text clearly suggests that Variety Magazine is a proper noun, and I7 now recognises this.
• Two bugs fixed to do with "when..." clauses attached to rules in unusual situations - both bugs having appeared only in 4F59. One related to rules in the form "check A when B", where A is an action including the word "it" (such as "telling it about") and B a condition; the other to "when" clauses attached to object-based rulebooks known never to run during activities, notably the reaching inside rules. In each case spurious problem messages were generated.
• Bug fixed so that things are no longer "lockable" by default. (Instead, locked containers and locked doors are lockable by default.)
• Bug fixed whereby an instruction like "Understand "[any actor]" as James Bond." would generate I6 code failing to compile through I6.
• Bug fixed whereby one token to match an object making use of another one would sometimes find the result corrupted: for instance, Understand "leg of [person]" as a leg. would get confused between the leg and the person whose leg it is said to be.
• Bug fixed whereby some combinations of name words and tokens to match the names of objects did not work.
• Bug fixed whereby meaningless text would sometimes match a "[number]" token when parsing. Moreover, "[number]" has been improved so that it now matches any literal decimal between -32768 and 32767 inclusive (i.e., the full 16-bit range of signed integers supported by the Z-machine) rather than duplicating the peculiar behaviour of the I6 number-parser, which worked only on non-negative numbers up to 10000.
• Bug fixed which caused too many things (and rooms) to have plural forms of their names recognised: for instance, a "red chair" would be referrable to in the plural as "red chairs" even if it was the only one, and this would cause ambiguity if a second object were in the same place and with its main singular name coincidentally "chairs". The convention now is that an object can be referred to in the plural with a name inherited from its kind if and only if it has no name of its own. (This change sounds substantial, but in fact did not change the behaviour of any of the examples.)
• Bug fixed whereby large numbers of identical objects could cause mysterious things to happen if ever 64 of them are in the same place at the same time. (In fact an I6 library bug: thank due to Martin Bays for his fix, which is patch L61125.)
• Bug fixed in which two things without names of their own were sometimes considered "indistinguishable" by the I6 parser, and therefore grouped into a plural (e.g., "six red blocks"), when in fact they were distinguishable by virtue of having a visible property which differed between the two (e.g., some being red, some being blue).
• Bug fixed causing documentation of examples in extensions to have any Inform 6 fragments in (- ... -) brackets lose the -). In particular, this affected the example in Menus by Emily Short.
• A limit on the number of different "in the presence of..." clauses allowed in a single source text has been removed. (Previously it stood at 100: now there is no limit.)
• A limit on the number of different noun- and scope-filtering tokens allowed in a single source text has been removed. (Previously it stood at 100: now there is no limit.)
• A limit on the number of new kinds of value which could be created by a single source text has been removed. (Previously it stood at 400: now there is no limit.)
• Two bugs fixed causing crashes in unlikely circumstances after a problem has been encountered.

Mac OS X app

• 4K40 contained a bug making it unreliable under Mac OS X on G4 or G5 processors: 4K41 is believed to fix this, with our apologies for the inconvenience. In all other respects it is identical to 4K40 and Mac OS X users with Intel processors need not download again.
• (Mac OS X only) The Skein's appearance has been redesigned, and an illustrated tutorial to the new-look Skein now appears as section 1.8 of the documentation for the OS X application. (We hope that similar changes will be made shortly in the Windows application.)
• (Mac OS X only) The Skein panel now has a Layout... button for customising the width and height proportions of the skein display.

Windows app

• (Windows only) Documentation links from the Index tab now work with Internet Explorer 7.
• (Windows only) The size, italic, text colour and background colour style hints are now supported when running a Glulx game in the game tab.