inform7/notes/release/1-6.md

Release notes for Inform v1.6 (build 3R85)

This release was made on 26 June 2006, a rapid replacement for a mis-uploaded 3R84, 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

• Two new adjectives, "on-stage" and "off-stage", have been added to the stock of those built in to Inform. See 7.9 in the documentation, "Removing things from play", for more on this; in particular, note that the previous reference in 7.9 to testing whether a thing is "somewhere" has been withdrawn. (This led to numerous difficulties with ambiguity, and in any case was not very explanatory.) We now test whether a thing is "on-stage" or "off-stage".
• Type-checking for conditions has been substantially rewritten. This mainly affects "if", "when" and "now", but other phrases too, and generally makes Inform stricter: for instance, "if the time since Escalating Danger began is greater than 1" used to work - but now I7 points out that a time cannot be compared with a number, and insists on "1 minute" rather than "1". This picked up minor errors in "Glass", "Reliques of Tolti-Aph" and the examples "Underlying" and "The Prague Job".
• The check removing rules have been rewritten. Previously, these duplicated the check taking rules, almost right down the line: in effect the two actions did the same thing, though being reported slightly differently. In the new version, a new rule called the "convert remove to take rule" actually converts the action from removing into taking at an early stage: the practical effect of this is that any before or instead rules written to cover taking now also cover removing. This is good because it means one no longer needs to remember to cover both these actions to be sure of handling the case of an actor picking something up.
• The scope of the "removing" action is changed so that if something is part of X, then it is in scope for "remove -- from X": previously, only the things inside X qualified. Being in scope for the action does not mean that the attempt to remove the part will succeed, of course, and it will normally fail the "can't take component parts rule": but being in scope does mean that the designer can write rules to allow removal after all.

Documentation, examples and extensions

Examples

• "Abolition of love": removed comment that shouldn't have been there
• "Bruneseau's Journey" slightly modified for tidiness
• Minor errors exposed by the improved type-checker fixed in "Prague", "Glass", "Crusoe", and "Underlying"
• Extra commentary and new material added to "Laura" to explain parsing of complex phrases better
• "Would you...?" added to demonstrate checking for the existence of a property
• "First Name Basis" added to demonstrate how to assign synonyms to objects
• "Tiny Garden" added to demonstrate a very simple implementation of continuous space
• "Equipment List" added to demonstrate and explain variant inventory styles
• "Tense Boxing" added to demonstrate past and present tense rules more completely
• "Grilling" added to demonstrate a supporter from which the player cannot take things
• "Removal" added to demonstrate a revised taking report
• "Nameless" added to demonstrate an ASK verb that works on objects, like SHOW
• "Stone" added to demonstrate rules used as properties of things

Extensions

• Documentation on newly installed extensions, not yet used, is now much fuller. This breaks the impasse of "can't use this until I read the documentation, can't read the documentation until I use this".
• "Basic Screen Effects": minor errors exposed by the new type-checker fixed
• "Locksmith": added yet more rule names; substantially updated to provide better defaulting and add a "keychain" kind; advanced to Version 2.
• "Rideable Vehicles": added rules to prevent mounting when already mounted, and to convert the exiting action to dismounting; added example.

Problem messages

• Problem messages improved for mysterious problems arising from trying to use local "let" variables in substituted text which turns up elsewhere in the source, i.e., in places where those variables do not exist.
• Problem message added if two rules are being added with the same name.

Bug fixes

• Fixed bug which caused negated conditions in the past and perfect tenses to fail: I7 would read, e.g., "if the box had not been open" as "if the box had been not open", which would generally be true much more easily.
• Fixed bug whereby actions declared without any mention of what they applied to (e.g., "Requesting help is an action out of world." rather than "Requesting help is an action out of world applying to nothing.") would sometimes lead to spurious incompatibility Problem messages when grammar is defined for the action. To clarify: from now on, an action which does not say what it applies to, applies to nothing. (This is tacitly assumed by some of the extensions source text already.)
• Fixed bug in which I7 allowed names with double-quoted text in, only to crash at the I6 stage; when the cause was actually a misunderstanding of the punctuation rules by the user.
• Fixed bug to do with names beginning with the word "kind", such as "kind gentleman".
• Fixed bug which caused properties declared by the "(called ...)" text in a new relation to have not quite the right type, causing odd type-checking problems elsewhere.
• Fixed bug in which negatively phrased implications would sometimes be read as if positive (e.g., "Scenery is never cold" is an implication not an inference because it concerns all things which have a given property at the start of play, not all things of a known kind; and it was being misread as if "Scenery is always cold").
• Fixed bug to do with initialising variables whose kind of value is "miscellaneous-value" or "string-of-text" (though the author of Inform wishes people wouldn't use hacky internal kinds of value with hyphens in the name, really).
• Fixed bug in which spurious problem messages occasionally occur when giving grammar which specifies only one of two required things to which an action will apply; and generally improved the previously uninformative "not compatible" grammar Problem message.
• Fixed bug in which "now" does not always set properties correctly.
• Fixed bug whereby Problems in the final chunk of a text with substitutions used explicitly as a value were not always reported.
• Fixed bug to do with relative clauses in property values (which are not allowed, but used to cause an internal error rather than a proper problem.)
• Fixed bug in which errors on grammar verbs were sometimes reported quoting the previous Understand... sentence in the source, not the one in which the error occurred.
• Fixed bug in sentence-breaking, whereby text ending with sentence-closing punctuation, immediately followed by a single word sentence in which the word was capitalised, would cause that single word to be ignored.
• Fixed bug whereby "else" was not always equivalent to "otherwise".
• Fixed bug to do with permissions for the "initially carried" property.

Mac OS X app

• (Mac OS X only) Direct "Install Extension..." option added to the File menu.
• (Mac OS X only) Extension documentation auto-updated when any file added to the extensions area, even if dragged by hand in the Finder.
• (Mac OS X only) Bug fixed that was causing Inform projects sometimes to appear as directories, and to fail to open on double-clicking.

Windows app

• (Windows only) Differences between the game's current text and the blessed text in the transcript tab are now underlined.
• (Windows only) The transcript is now saved in the same format as the OS X application. (This means that any blessed transcript text saved from an earlier version will have to be recreated.)
• (Windows only) The source tab now correctly colours nested comments.
• (Windows only) Entering a carriage return with the shift key held down no longer results in text that the compiler rejects.
• (Windows only) Setting the focus on the game tab by clicking in it with the mouse now keeps the input cursor on the input line being edited.
• (Windows only) Added a warning dialog to the "Bless All" button on the transcript tab.
• (Windows only) The bless buttons on the transcript tab are now disabled if there is nothing to do.
• (Windows only) If the registry DWORD value "HKCU\Software\David Kinder\Inform\Start\Open Last Project" exists and is not set to zero, then when starting the application just opens the last project, rather than displaying the splash screen. If the registry DWORD value "HKCU\Software\David Kinder\Inform\Window\Clean Up Indexes" exists and is set to zero, then when closing a project the index files are not deleted. (Based on patches by Dan Shiovitz.)