porting inform 7 / zcode interactive fiction interpreters?
 

Hi guys, I'm pretty sure no one has compiled the Inform 7 IDE form Maemo. Could any kind soul who is interested in this project take a look at it? I suppose I could try it myself but I don't have a lot of experience with compiling stuff from source. Here is the link: http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7/Inform%207.html

It's a really cool system that allows you to write and play interactive fiction games in something close to natural language.

Re: porting inform 7 / zcode interactive fiction interpreters?
 

Great idea. I have a soft spot for Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And people are still making (amateur) new games for the Inform engine.

Re: porting inform 7 / zcode interactive fiction interpreters?
 

Hey, who says they have to be amateur ;)

Anyway I'm having major compiling woes. I keep getting an error when I try to compile on the device. Could anyone try it out?

Re: porting inform 7 / zcode interactive fiction interpreters?
 

I haven't taken a look at any of this, and if you really need the GUI, this won't help...

They do seem to make an arm build of the command line version. On their download page, you'll see a link to download the CLI for general Linux architectures. Try extracting that archive somewhere, and running install-inform7.sh This will install it to the /usr/local directory (I would make sure you're root before running the script...)

Looking a bit more into it, this seems to use perl, so you'll need to install that. Even with perl, you're not guaranteed to have all the required perl modules that it needs to run. Good luck!

[edit]Could you also post the error messages you're getting?

Re: porting inform 7 / zcode interactive fiction interpreters?
 

Well, I have not finished trying to get inform7 to compile (needs a few libs I dont have yet) but just to get by for a while I compiled inform6 which being CLI doesnt need any fancy libs.

I did see the download of a cli version for generic linux, but I thought one compiled specifically for maemo in scratchbox might just work a schooch better. (inform 7 uses inform 6 embedded to actually encode the source files anyway...)

This doesn't play inform/Z-Code/Infocom/whatever games (you can use Gfrotz for that) but allows you to compile raw code into your own inform/Z-Code/Infocom adventure games.

It includes a html manual in MyDocs/.documents/InformManual/index.html (Documents/InformManual/index.html in the gui) which will explain most of what you need to get started.

The program is about 2 megish installed and you can download it from my website (http://www.n8ftl.com/maemo/inform/in...1-ARMEL.tar.gz) extract it from / and it will run from /home/user

Here is a sample inf (source code) file (http://www.n8ftl.com/maemo/inform/adventureland.inf) which will give you an idea how to start. You can compile this by (in Xterm) /home/user/inform adventureland

/home/user/inform -h1 and -h2 will explain all the cli options to you.

enjoy, and I will keep plugging away at inform7

-John

Re: porting inform 7 / zcode interactive fiction interpreters?
 

Well, Inform7 is going to be a while, I can not even get the missing libs to install in scratchbox let alone on the tablet.

I will keep trying but I think sticking with Inform6 from my last post and then editing it in nano or maemopad+ or something might be the ticket. perhaps I will work on an editor/gui for 6 rather than porting 7 lol...


-John