8.4 KiB
Release notes for Inform v8.5 (build 6G60)
This release was made on 23 December 2010, before Inform was open-sourced. At that time bugs were tracked by a Mantis server, with seven-digit issue numbers, and versions of Inform were identified by build codes in the form NLNN. Suggestion numbers, also large but not starting with a 0, referred to tickets at a Uservoice forum then in use.
This is part of the historical archive of release notes.
Overview
This release of Inform leaves the core language unchanged, except for the correction of a small number of bugs, and its main purpose is to provide an improved Index. Better maps are drawn on the World Index, and there's more detail across several other pages.
Index
Although we have given the Index a comprehensive revision, the effect is more evolutionary than revolutionary. Most of the changes are refinements aimed at people with larger source texts. We'd like to thank everyone who made suggestions on the forum at inform7.uservoice.com, whether we accepted these or not.
The major change in this build is to the World Index page, where the method used to deduce the positions of rooms has been replaced by a more sophisticated algorithm, producing better-laid-out rooms for a variety of source texts; and where maps are also better rendered. A text-only change log is not the best place to explain what has been done, so we have prepared a PDF file to accompany the new build, illustrating what's new.
Otherwise, there are changes as follows:
Actions Index
Acting on suggestion 1163485, we have provided a new index of the Understand tokens which are built-in (like "[things]") or defined in the source, or in extensions. Definitions are shown, with source links, and there are documentation links.
The general actions rulebooks - before, after, instead, and so on - used to be indexed at the foot of this page. They have moved, and are now at the top of the Rules Index page.
Contents Index
The contents listing by heading now opens with the title and author rather than the word "Contents".
The memory usage estimates are now shown only for projects with the Z-machine setting, since they're irrelevant for Glulx, and are hidden behind a (+) icon.
Acting on suggestion 1238573, there's now an index of the use options which are currently set for a project; there are source links as usual, and also paste icons for setting currently unset options.
Kinds Index
This was overhauled back in the summer, so not much has changed in this one. However, the sometimes distractingly long lists of objects belonging to each kind have been shaded in grey or (in cases where they become long enough to make it worthwhile) hidden behind a (+) icon. On very large projects, this makes a big difference to legibility.
Phrasebook Index
The table of "Relations" now has column headings.
The table of "Verbs used in descriptions" now includes the meanings of verbs (i.e., which relations they correspond to), and links to the source text definitions of any new verbs. Prepositional usages such as "To be adjacent to" are also listed for the first time (see bug report 0000395, though this wasn't really a bug as such).
Rules Index
Acting on suggestion 1099933, the rules index is consolidated onto a single page which shows the names of all of the rulebooks; actual contents of each rulebook are hidden behind a (+), but the number of rules in the book can be seen without opening it, and in particular empty rulebooks or activities are shaded grey. The "Detail view" sub-pages of the Rules Index are therefore no longer needed.
Also following 1099933, there are now source links to the creations of rulebooks and activities in the source text.
The groups of rulebooks have been reordered to put the ones most useful to working Inform authors at the top, and the technicalities down at the bottom. In particular, the action rulebooks have moved here from the Actions Index.
Scenes Index
This is unchanged. It was perfect already.
World Index
As noted above, the map-making algorithm is entirely overhauled, but in ways we won't detail here. In addition, each room and thing has a (+) icon hiding a new panel of details, including the properties and where they are set; the kind, and where it is set; map connections and region (for rooms), and where they are set; and a list of rules in the source text which make specific reference to the room or thing in question.
Following suggestion 1109933, the World Index map now follows the same room colouring as the EPS map, where this has been specified. So, for example:
Index map with room-colour of Zoo set to "Navy" and room-name-colour of
Zoo set to "White".
will now affect both maps. (The only settings recognised by the World Index map are "room-colour" and "room-name-colour", and only for named individual rooms and for regions.)
Bug fixes
Source text and punctuation
Bug fixed (0000381) to improve problem messages for doubtful phrase punctuation.
Bug fixed (0000400) to improve problem message for text substitutions using exotic Unicode characters as part of their names.
Bug fixed (0000373) whereby improperly using brackets to define an antonym, like so:
Definition: a room is home (rather than house) if ...
would cause an internal error rather than a problem message. (Removing the brackets makes this work as intended.)
Assertions and creations
Bug fixed (0000370) whereby Inform wasn't allowing words long enough to hold enormous URLs, or the longest word in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
Bug fixed (0000375) whereby very deeply recursive assemblies would spuriously produce problem messages for composite names which were too long.
Model world
Bug fixed (0000432) whereby the problem message for a three-sided door wasn't giving source text links.
Bug fixed (0000372) whereby the BRIEF printing mode was still being described as "normal", when in fact it's no longer the default.
Properties
Bug fixed (0000390) whereby misleading problem messages were issued for attempts to create properties of actions, activities or rulebooks.
Bug fixed (0000397) whereby Inform produced an internal error rather than a problem message for attempts to use "player" as a constant property value. (The "player" is not constant, because point of view can switch during play.)
Rules and rulebooks
Bug fixed (0000405) whereby rules written like so:
Carry out an actor dead end reaching: ...
would cause spurious problem messages if (a) the action had its participle, in this case "reaching", as other than the first word; and (b) the text "an actor" was given to specify who would be doing it.
Scenes
Bug fixed (0000415) whereby Inform could hang if told that scene S begins when scene T ends and also vice versa.
Phrases and functional programming
Bug fixed (0000398) whereby Inform produced an internal error instead of a problem message for an attempt to use "otherwise if" incorrectly.
Bug fixed (0000404) whereby attempts to use descriptions rather than explicit values in the phrase "place ... in scope" would cause an internal error rather than a problem message.
Equations, units and arithmetic
An embarrassing one, this: bug fixed (0000370) whereby, when printing numbers in words, Inform printed billions as "millions".
Indexing
Bug fixed (0000363) whereby kinds were listed as kinds of themselves in the Lexicon (as for instance "animal... noun, a kind of animal").
Bug fixed (0000351) whereby an EPS map, if output, didn't respect instructions to map non-standard directions like "starboard".
Bug fixed (0000371) whereby regions on the World Index weren't being coloured as they should have been, and whereby disconnected components were being superimposed in some cases.
Windows app
The preferences dialog now allows the font and font size to be changed.
If a window is brought to the front, and its underlying source file has been changed by another program, then the source file is re-loaded. The only exception to this is if the source has been changed in Inform 7 but not saved, in which case there is no re-load.
The settings file is only now updated if the user changes any of the project's settings, and the settings file format has been adjusted to be closer to the latest version of the OS X Inform front-end.
Linux app
Fixed the same bug as on the other platforms (0000394) which caused incorrect highlighting of Unicode quotation marks.
Made some other minor improvements to syntax highlighting.