Beyond the usability problems of forcing people to put all of their code into one file (a convention that I7 hypocritically fails to follow), such a convention presumes that all game designers use a linear, top-to-bottom, design process. I think of fusing smaller parts into a greater whole. The latter process groups like things together to be dealt with in their own area, limiting bleed and spillover into other topics, which creates a meta-level separation of function and data based upon internal similarity. That is, all functionality and data relating to topic/idea A is placed in the A file; the same goes for topic/idea B, topic/idea C, and so forth. This has parallels to traditional object-oriented language (and even functional programming), in that it minimizes the number of interface points. If you don’t do that, then it quickly becomes hard, if not impossible, to tell what your code is doing. So, you define the interface points and keep them as few as possible; separate files work in an analogous manner. And furthermore, they work this way because they reflect a typically human organizational scheme. People don’t heap everything into one common storage area. No, for they have waste baskets, refrigerators, and soap dishes — all different areas of containment for different things. Thus, if I declaim being forced into a single file for my code, it stems from a natural tendency to separate like objects into separate groupings.

That aside, I7′s story paradigm fails due to the output of the language itself. If what I7 produced was something that could be read from top to bottom, linearly, like a novel, then the need to group related materials together would be eliminated. The content is the issue, and the code is the issue. I7 output does NOT read straight through like a novel, and it never could, because a game is not a novel. While the needs of a game itself provide the first hurdle, the next hurdle is something that I7 sets up for itself: how rulebooks function.

The paradigm of the rulebook is that all like rules governing an object go in the same rulebook — or is it that all actions relating to all objects go into a rulebook? No matter which you choose, things quickly get out of hand. It would be wise to do both; however, if you do that, then your code cannot read straight through. It makes more sense to group together rules that affect multiple objects in a place divorced from any object (like in a separate file), or at the beginning of some section. But in order to refer to that section, you must return to it, or skip forward to it, breaking the processing flow of the game from top of page to bottom of page. I7 assumes that we’re all writing from top of page to bottom of page, writing as if we had only an old Selectrac typewriter, dutifully punching out one row after another.

That is an amazingly restrictive assumption, and it caters only to those who design puzzle-based games; it does not work well for most creative types. Editing on a typewriter is a painful and laborious process. What do you do when the ideas keep coming and have to improved or revised or discarded altogether? Clearly, you must brainstorm and edit elsewhere, and use the typewriter only to capture the finished idea, and you must be correct about that finished idea or else you begin the process anew. I could not write on a typewriter. I can write on paper, because although the paper has lines, I am not forced to use them. I can erase, write over, draw arrows, scratch things out, or even turn the page sideways. A text editor captured most of the creative capacities of paper, and naturally I seek out systems that allow me the same freedom in design. Like goes with like.

I7 imposes a harsh, utilitarian, one-size-fits-all unencouraging, unforgiving framework that in no way respects the creative process. It really is probably the worst possible tool for the job at hand, and the same people who have created this monstrosity are ever deaf, dumb, and blind, to all the pain, angst, and problems that they have created. They do not learn; they do not improve. Their reaction? Let the documentation fix it. However, no documentation can correct the erroneous worldview of I7. I7 fails to be usable.

The first step in making a usable product is to understand humanity; the first interface of I7 is between the language and the humans using it, and that is where it fails. From that set of wrong axioms, it descends, slowly and twistingly, into a dark valley of flawed assumptions that in the end, shuts out all light from the sky.

Inspiration is unpredictable, haphazard, wild, beautiful, and unrestrained. It is not logical, orderly, or predictable. Thus, in order to harness these wild winds, the creative type needs a flexible tool. I7 is not flexible. The creative type needs a tool that gets out of his way. I7 handholds you, even during the error messages. The creative type needs something that is not so obsessed with structure or details, but something that allows him to capture the thought, the moment, the spirit of things. Not that I6 is a great tool for doing that, but it gets in the way a lot less than I7 does. I6 lets you indent all you want, but I7 punishes you for hitting the tab an extra time.

The one-size-fits-all process requirement is completely at odds with human nature, and violently at odds with the creative nature. The people who lie down and wear the chains of I7 are probably accustomed to wearing the chains in other areas as well. I strongly suspect, that beyond politics, that people who are used to doing things in a top-down, logically straitjacketed, order from begin to end with no deviations are not in fact conservative, as some might think. However, they do desire a world that can be perfectly controlled as they perfectly control their games, their writing, their relationships, and so on. They have a command economy sort of life. Like the gargantuan hubris that produces such monstrosities of economic failure such as Kensianism and Socialism, we have I7 in the realm of game design — a command-economy manacle manufacturer for the mind, that produces a world where everyone is the same, everyone wears the same dirty tweed pants, marches in line to the same bread lines and sings the same forced songs, while the rifle butts of the soldiers collapse ribcages and kill the will to live free.

A fundamental misunderstanding of the human nature coupled with the mad hubris of the self-righteous leads to horrors (Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Mohammed). While I have no suspicion that I7 will lead to the gulags, the gas chambers, or the minarets, it has done its part in adding to the dominion of evil, for it lies about how people think, lies about how artists think, and tries to force us all into a restrictive mindset.

It will fail like a spectacle, like the Hindenburg.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,900 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 48 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

[W] Brickhouse – ALAN

[M] Burn the Koran and Die – I7

[D] Marelithia – RenPy

[M] New Cat – I7

[D] Occupied – I6

[W] Seasons — I6/Glulx

[M] Zegrothenus – I6

The chart measures state and intensity of effort, with brighter colors regarded as more intense; green is working; red is blocked; brown is design; blue is maintenance; grey is stasis (no active development). My development process goes from design -> working -> maintenance. Stasis is a state for projects on the back burner or projects that I’ve decided not to update any longer.

Individual project comments:

• Brickhouse — Yeah, I need to get back to this.
• Burn the Koran and Die — I have some feedback I’ve been avoiding (mostly because I expect it to be obnoxious), but I doubt there’s anything left to do on this one.
• Occupied — This will be a lot of fun to write. It’s going to be a political satire of the Occupy movement. *rubbing hands together in glee* This should virtually write itself.
• Marelithia — Medieval dating sim. Ren’Py has come a long way. The big holdup for this will be the graphics, because my drawing skills are rudimentary. But I figure if I do line art and then apply a sepia filter to it, it will evoke the middle ages the way that the Avernum series does (the first four games, anyways).
• New Cat — I probably will update this again someday, but right now I don’t feel like it, due to an obnoxious review(er) on IFdb. New Cat took a good six months of my life, had no beta testers (despite several calls for them) and now the complainers show up to berate me? A hearty “screw you” to all such unhelpful people — especially when the contact info is in the game. Private emails I do a reasonably good job of responding to, but public humiliation doesn’t motivate me in the slightest.
• Zegrothenus — I have some feedback from a while back that I’m churning through. Now that I have some vacation time, I can put some effort into it.

One is that people generally recognize that the Inform 7 docs suck (as I’ve pointed out in several articles here, and here), yet they continue to use the language anyways. Why? Maybe they were where I was, thinking that their game was small enough, or easy enough. Maybe they think that other people learning stuff and telling it to them piecemeal on a forum is enough. Maybe they have some kind of faith that the docs will eventually end up in a useable format.

If it’s the first of these, I can understand that pall of benighted intellect; I too thought I7 was a realistic environment for a game of about 20 rooms. I was wrong, and while my code didn’t end up look as bad as Weischaupt Scholars, it got uncomfortably close. If it’s the second reason, they are fools and are doomed to be frustrated, and if it’s the last, their faith is horribly misplaced.

After three years in beta, the Inform 7 docs are not going to reach a state of usefulness any time soon. They are not written like a technical manual and in order to get them to that point, they will have to be rewritten entirely (see the whole rationale here). In other words, there’s a reason why other manuals for I7 exist. Even they are not enough, as the frustrated folks on the forum attest.

Another person blithely thought that someone could learn English by learning I7. *expression of gape-jawed incredulity* That statement would deserve a pass if I7 modeled English’s word-order flexibility, its natural synonyms, and its general robustness (leaving out an article doesn’t render the sentence wholly incomprehensible, for instance). However, I7 does none of these things, which guarantees that prospective learners will not understand English, but at best will master elevating their own heart rate unproductively. Unfortunately, they will learn how to despise a caricature of a language, and believe that the caricature is the language itself.

First, I7 assumes that there’s only one way to word your sentence: e.g. Now the boat is floating (works), is not the same as The boat is floating now (fails). Learning I7 would not teach anyone about English’s word-order flexibility. You would learn a set of arbitrary rules, not the language, and even those rules would be erroneous (that ‘now’ must come first in any sentence is wholly false).

Second, I7 teaches that words have few or zero synonyms, which is about as far from the spirit of English as possible! It teaches that you can never use options as choices for verbs or prepositions — that selling the baby or the sock doesn’t make sense. Yet, that phrase is structurally sound English and simply comprehended. Another example: the phrase in the bathroom or the bowl, likewise isn’t understood by I7.

I7 was never designed to be English, so any dreams of learning English by learning I7 are woefully misconstrued. Other computer programming languages, although they using a handful of phrases in idosyncratic ways (with in VB, for in C, picture in COBOL, etc), do not read like English, and at best read as some sort of pidgin language. The text surrounding their appropriated phrases is clearly not English and that makes it easier/easy for the programmer to craft a separate semantic space for the new language. When learners scan a block of text, they are able to tell quickly, “Ok, this is VB. I will understand ‘with’ in the VB way.” However, Inform7 doesn’t allow you to do that. When you look at I7 code snippets (not real games — they look like this) at first blush, they seem to be English — only, frustratingly, their words don’t mean what English words mean. So you have to keep reminding yourself that this is not English and that the words you see don’t mean what they mean in English and most frustrating of all, that they can’t be used like English words. The lack of typical programming language constructs confuses and makes understanding the language a constant challenge, because whenever you attempt to use I7 like English, there’s only a small chance that you’ll guess what its idosyncratic designers designed the language to do. Programming in Inform is much like learning to conduct a symphony with your right hand when you are a southpaw that suffers from hearing loss. The context doesn’t help you interpret the language. It tells you that you are reading or writing, and you aren’t.

Finally, what I7 teaches the prospective English learner about English itself is that it is: changeable by only a few (false), highly resistant to change (false), that it does not adapt to the needs of its learners (false), that it consists of a maze of one-way streets (false), that it is poorly documented (false), that it is brittle (false), and that it is unsuited for long works (false).

If I had realized earlier the true nature of I7 (brittle, deceptive, poorly documented), I would not have used it for New Cat. I would have gone the I6 route or even the Alan route. What did I learn? Even a relatively small game will end up in pages and pages of confusing quasi-English that becomes almost impossible to parse. The problem there is that the prose isn’t a narrative, so there’s no built-in way for you to understand it, and artificial distinctions don’t make sense from a linguistic perspective. As a point of comparison, Seasons is ten times the size of New Cat (at least) and because of its semantic shortcuts and non-English nature, it is only a quarter more difficult to understand.

Liberate te ex infernis.

I guess that’s a common experience when you craft a large game or you craft many games, this feeling of being in an operating theatre, focused on the details. Hopefully the end result will turn out more attractive than Frankenstein, but because the effort is so gargantuan, I’ll be satisfied if it moves, talks, and can see! Along that same line, I’m up to the 21st internal revision of the code, with probably 40% more to go. And like Dr. Frankenstein, I’ve often lost heart and threw up my hands (not my lunch) in frustration. There was a period of time where I didn’t even touch the code for a year and some months.

Still, I will succeed, and it looks like probably the end of 2012, Seasons should be ready for the world. I have no idea how the beta-testing will go, but I don’t place much hope in there being many volunteers. Then there’s still the site to create, the music, the sound effects, and the hint guide (with all those lush illustrations I see in my mind’s eye). Whew. Just thinking about it all can be tiresome.

Along the way, I’ve had to heavily customize and/or create my own tools, which is more effort still, although that effort makes the remaining work easier. Hopefully some of these mods will be released when Seasons is, if not before:

• Compiler: Inform 6.3.2 patch to allow compiler messages to continue on the same line as the previous message
• Library: English.h – allow listing of just the objects on a supporter with no other verbiage
• Library: Parserm.h – allow turning off inference messages
• OR Library: Combat – a quick and dirty combat system with healing, AC, and weapons of variable damage
• OR Library: Messages_Off – ability to turn off the compilation messages for OR Lib modules
• OR Library: Physics – a harnessing of the physics extension
• Working example of Glulx game that doesn’t use Blorb

Well, back to work!

Annoying discovery #1: MacGlulxe (for OS 8.x-9.x) does not support sound. Although that initially enraged me, I quickly accepted it as typical. I already knew that it didn’t support Unicode. I guess the designer just figured to skimp on something as unnecessary as sound, too. Sigh. This means that my design platform must be OS X, to be specific OS X 10.5, on the fastest 17″ iMac that Apple ever sold. What can I say? I <3 the screen size and the form factor.

Annoying discovery #2: How you name files is critical. Yes, I’d read Roger Firth’s Glulx page, and Doe’s Glulx for Dunces, and even Emily Short’s Glulx page (I was desperate), but it still took me a lot of trial and effort to figure this out.

In short: if you are not going to Blorb your game on the Mac, the filenames must be EXACTLY like this: PIC# and SND#, where # is a number. Also, you must start with number zero for whichever resource you use first. On Mac OS X, this means that you must do a Command-I to remove the extension from the file. On the Mac side, the resources cannot have extensions! Roger Firth’s advice was dead wrong.

As for sound, I had read that the only files supported are OGG, MOD, and 8-bit AIFF files. AIFFs definitely work, although I think that all Glulx interpreters downsample all AIFFs to 8 bits. Even if that is happening, it sounds good. You still have to do Command-I to remove the extension, though. Going forward, I’ll probably use OGG to save space.

Annoying discovery #3: Zoom doesn’t support sound. This one blew my mind. Zoom was my favorite interpreter, due to its interface and design. However, none of its Glulx interpreters support sound. Why? I don’t see any reason for Zoom to be crippled this way. That resulted in me switching over to Gargoyle for my interpreter of choice. It’s the best cross-platform interpreter out there, and it will make distro of Seasons a bit easier as well (one interpreter to rule them and all). In short, the interpreter designed for the Mac does not support Glulx sound, but the cross-platform one does. Weird.

Annoying discovery #4: No-one gives an example of a Glulx game that is not Blorbified. Yeah. Everyone assumes that your first intro to Glulx means that you will be going through all the extra steps to create a RES file and Blorb things up. Geez, people, why just not assume your intro to Calculus means that you’re playing around with Fermi’s equations, too? Talk about infuriating.

PEOPLE DO NOT LEARN by choosing the most difficult task in a new area. If you present information this way, they give up in frustration because they simply don’t have the experience or the knowledge to get anywhere. People learn by mastering smaller tasks, which gives them the confidence and understanding to master the difficult task.

What I’m going to do is to put the sample game that I created out on the Web complete with a sound/graphics resource so that you can compile it to Glulx and it will run — no questions asked. Then you can see exactly what you have to do to make it work.

Annoying discovery #5: The best Blorb tools are Windows-only. There is no tool that allows you to give your resources names other than SND# and PIC# on the Mac side. The only reasonable tool that I found for creating Blorb files was gBlorb. It does work and it is cross-platform, but your source code still can’t use identifiers like “autumn_sound”, like Doe does in Just a Dream. Sigh.

Now someone will say, “There is source code available!” Yes, and if you’ve ever tried to compile source code, then you know the nightmare that awaits you. You can spend days setting up your environment and building the thing only to have it fail due to an assumption in the code that prevents it from compiling on your platform. I’ve been there many times, which is why those words don’t work on me!

Still, I threw a few minutes at it. iBlorb needs dos.h, which is a collection of DOS functions that can’t be ported to other platforms, unless “porting” = “write equivalent OS-dependent code from scratch.” Loverly.

That leaves cBlorb, which as part of I7, is wholly undocumented. I guess I’ll see if I can deduce how it blorbifies a game with pictures and sound and go from there. Sigh.

I’m shaking my head now, seriously wondering about the future of IF.

First of all, this is just another example of the well-publicized and global reach of IF — and by that I mean its utter lack of either. Second, the results themselves speak of the power of the Old Ones and the commitment of their associated groupies (a certain author has four games in the top fifty of all time). Goodbye quality writing; goodbye pacing; goodbye plot; and let’s altogether forget about any inkling of morality. Third of all, the results speak to all of self-important and utterly unaware nature of a dying community, which is both sad and predictable. Yes, I can completely see some of these as being the best IF of all time, can’t you?

The humorous undertone to this is the full title of the poll: The Best IF of All Time (2011 edition). Whatever the results are this year, they will change in the next. That lies in the nature of all polls instead of evaluations that rely upon objective criteria (say, how often a game was downloaded from the ifarchive for example).

Download from Intaligo, and check out the game on Ifdb. Enjoy!

This version makes the function button work again, listing all the functions in an Inform file and allowing you to jump to any one of them. It also adds a few obscure keywords to the text-coloring routine.

For Mac OS 9.x and BBEdit 7.x (will probably will work with OS 8.x and BBedit 7.x-9.x). Requires some variant of Stuffit to unstuff.

Download and enjoy!

Haters are a real problem in IF. By “haters”, I mean irresponsible people who eviscerate games for no justifiable reason; these are people who have nothing eternal to stand on, but simply attack games according to the fashion wheel of their feelings. Worse yet, these people band together and excrete their venom anonymously, feeling as brave as Klansmen. They never submit bug reports; they never have anything constructive to say; they exist to tear down what they could not even attempt.

I have recently experienced the haters and I am coming to think that for them, a special place is reserved in my releases; although I can think up many ways to immortalize them, a simple list should suffice. And really, why shouldn’t I? I praise those who aided me; should I not expose those who were unkind?

I am beginning to think that someone must call out these worthless individuals, expose them, and shame them, so that they would change and not be worthless. That would be the purpose of a “no thanks” list — not something personal and petty, but rather something that gave a public warning about certain individuals — to provoke them to change and in the meantime, to help everyone else to steer clear of them.