Bart Massey

Section - The Briefing Book

The briefing book is a book on the briefing table. The title is "Inform 7 Briefing Book" [sic]. The manuscript of the briefing book is the Table of Briefing Book Pages.

To say p: say paragraph break.

To say l: say line break.

Table of Briefing Book Pages

Page Text

"[italic type]Inform 7 Briefing Book[roman type][l]by Bart Massey[p]Contents[l]* History (p. 2)[l]* Goals (p. 3)[l]* Example (p. 4)[l]* Learning (p. 5)[l]* Caveats (p. 6)[l]* Conclusions (p. 7)"

"Inform 7 is a language for writing text adventures.[p]I7 builds on Inform 6, a standard-looking (mostly) procedural language.[p]I6 is built on the Infocom [italic type]z-code[roman type] infrastructure.[p]I7 compiles to I6, which compiles to z-code.[p]Anything with a keyboard and display probably runs z-code."

"The goal of I7 is to allow game authors to write in lightly-stylized English.[p]It turns out to be doable (even nice?) to write fairly intricate behaviors in this style.[p]Specifying machines, non-player characters (NPCs), complex environments, time, scenes, data structures, reasonable user I/O, and the like in I7 is routine for game writers.[p]In support of this, I7 offers powerful first-class features including a relation-base, constraint solvers, full functional programming, etc---all in reasonablish English."

"The behavior of the book you are reading now was specified in maybe 30 paragraphs of I7.[p]The behavior and environment of the NPC next door, which includes playing perfect Nim, was specified in about 10 paragraphs.[p]Rather than give examples here, I would suggest that you go out-of-world (a cool power) and look at the I7 source to the tinyverse you live in."

"Learning I7 takes a while and is challenging.[p]The community is great, and mostly lives on a MUD.[p]The IDE is pretty nice. Sadly, it works best on Windows, then Mac, then X, but even on X it is quite usable.[p]There's a ton of documentation, but it is quite scattered; I need to work on a metapage.[p]The manual isn't my style: sort of random examples that wind in a not-too-structured way through this vast language."

"There are several downsides to I7.[p]The not-quite-English can be hard to remember and write (although the tools really try to help).[p]The language is huge and changes fairly regularly.[p]The open source situation is...complicated.[p]The limitations of zcode show through.[p]The learning curve is longggg."

"People write non-game-ish demos and stuff in I7 all the time. This is just one example. You can find more on the web.[p]I7 is also a good model for how to do user interaction via DSL. I think it generalizes to GUI UX etc.[p]Inform 7 is cool. You should learn it."

Inform 7 Notes — 6 of 35