mirror of
https://github.com/ganelson/inform.git
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52 lines
2.6 KiB
HTML
52 lines
2.6 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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{include-css}
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<title>New To Inform?</title>
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</head>
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<body>
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<p><span class="headingpaneltext">New To Inform?</span></p>
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<p>Inform is both an application and a language for creating text-based
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interactive stories. Interactive fiction is an art form which evolved out of the
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adventure games of the 1970s, in the same way that today's graphic novels
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evolved out of the newspaper cartoons of the 1930s. Inform has been the design
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tool of choice for many, indeed most, of the world's leading writers in this
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genre since 1993, and is also widely used in education at a variety of levels.
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It's completely free, even when used to create commercial works. Thanks for
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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
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remove it by typing ⌘L.) You might like to try clicking Onyx, the smallest
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of the samples, under the "Open a Sample Project" list: it's a very
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short Russian folk-tale. Inform will ask you to choose somewhere on disc to
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store it, and then make a copy there. You can play with this and alter it
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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
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single window which is divided in half. The left and right sides are called
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"panes" and you can choose what's shown in them with the side tabs: it
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starts out as Source on the left, Documentation on the right. (From the
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Launcher, you can also save out a copy of the documentation as an EPUB file to
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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
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story. To see that in action, click the Go button for the Onyx project. You'll
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have to wait just a moment - an Inform project is a surprisingly complicated
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thing to make, even when the instructions look short - but then the Story pane
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will open, and you can type in commands as if you were the player. If you're not
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sure what to type, try typing:</p>
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<blockquote>
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TEST ME
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</blockquote>
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<p>The Launcher also offers a larger sample project called "Disenchantment
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Bay", a story about a boat trip in Alaska. Beyond that, there are around
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450 Examples in the Documentation, and by clicking on the "save as
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project" icon you can get playable versions of all of those, too.</p>
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<hr style="margin-top: 18px;">
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</body>
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</html>
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