Inform 7 Released

Now, here’s something worth blogging about! I’d been wondering why there was no activity on Inform for years.

Graham Nelson has just released Inform 7. Now, this is no incremental release, it’s a revolutionary release!

Inform is a system for developing interactive fiction (or adventure games, as they were once called) that targetted Infocom‘s Z-machine virtual machine. Inform 6 was a great language for developing interactive fiction, and the Z-machine was versatile enough to produce some surprising results.

It also had an excellent natural language parser.

But now, after three years of work, you don’t need to be able to program to develop IF with Inform: Inform 7 was announced yesterday on rec.arts.int-fiction and now understands natural language (and compiles that to Inform 6 code), and has an IDE to make it simple for non-programmers—writers—to develop IF. What can’t be easily modelled in English can be described graphically.

I haven’t had time to give the documentation a proper read-through, but what I’ve see is pretty incredible! Go take a look.