Inform 7

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Inform 7
Authoring system
[[File:|385px|center]]
Links Home page Download Run online
Developer Graham Nelson
Formats Glulx, Z-code
Interaction style Parser
Systems Windows, macOS, Linux, browser
System details An online editor is available: see Borogove.
Latest version 10.1.2 / 31 Aug 2022
Status Stable
Uses interpreter
Multimedia support
License Artistic 2.0
Notes See also: Inform 6; Inform.
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Inform 7 (also known as just "Inform") is an interactive fiction authoring system. It is notable for its use of a subset of natural language and for being rule based, rather than object based.

Although Inform 7 was the successor to Inform 6, the syntax of the language is entirely different to its predecessor. The original link to Inform 6 lay under the hood: an Inform story was translated to Inform 6, which is then compiled into Glulx or Z-Code by the Inform 6 compiler. (As of version 10, this translation is more indirect and optional, but still used in the majority of cases.) This means that works produced using Inform 7 can in principle be played on Z-Code interpreters (although there are some modifications required, as, for example, Inform 7 games tend to use a larger stack than Inform 6, and works often max out the capacity of even the version 8 Z-Machine as they grow).

Inform 7 was first released as a public beta on April 30th, 2006.

Early Inform 7 games

The earliest Inform 7 game released to the public may have been Mystery House Possessed (Emily Short; 2005) for the Mystery House Taken Over project.

On March 1st, 2006, three example games were released (see the rgif announcement: Three Games in Inform 7). These games were:

Inform 7 was released as a public beta on April 30th, 2006. Three more example games were released at the same time:

All six example games are available from the Inform 7 Examples page, now maintained by Alex Proudfoot.

Timeline of Builds

See also the version history, which includes release notes.

  • 3K27 - (30 April 2006)
  • 3K56 - (4 May 2006)
  • 3L95 - (14 May 2006)
  • 3M43 - (21 May 2006)
  • 3P53 - (9 June 2006)
  • 3R85 - (26 June 2006)
  • 3T38 - (10 July 2006)
  • 3V01 - (2 August 2006)
  • 3Z95 - (14 September 2006)
  • 4B91 - (10 November 2006)
  • 4F59 - (21 December 2006)
  • 4K40 - (23 January 2007)
  • 4K41 - (23 January 2007)
  • 4S08 - (25 March 2007)
  • 4U65 - (27 April 2007)
  • 4U67 - (7 May 2007)
  • 4W37 - (27 July 2007)
  • 4X60 - (24 August 2007)
  • 5G67 - (10 November 2007)
  • 5J39 - (1 December 2007)
  • 5T18 - (30 April 2008)
  • 5U92 - (13 September 2008)
  • 5Z71 - (18 April 2009)
  • 6E59 - (12 June 2010)
  • 6E72 - (1 July 2010)
  • 6F95 - (25 October 2010)
  • 6G60 - (23 December 2010)
  • 6L02 - (4 May 2014)
  • 6L38 - (30 August 2014)
  • 6M62 - (24 December 2015)
  • 10.1.0 - (20 August 2022)
  • 10.1.1 - (21 August 2022)
  • 10.1.2 - (31 August 2022)

(Releases from 2006-2015 were primarily referred to at the time with the build codes shown here, such as 6M62. With the release of version 10 in 2022, the version scheme changed, and old releases were retrospectively given numeric version numbers like 9.3 - noted in announcement.)

Authors of Inform 7

See also: Inform7.com, the official website.

Links

Official links

General articles about Inform 7

Third-party documentation, tips, and examples

See also: Category:Inform 7 tutorials, Category:Examples of Inform 7 code

Public discussion

Notable newsgroup and forum postings about Inform 7:

Reviews

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