Caltrops - Game Development





	[quote name="Mysterio"]This is a letter that an actual adult (assumed) sent a maintainer of a text adventure language. [quote]Totally and completely off topic but I don’t know where else to ask it: are you ever going to talk about the “death” of Inform 7? You seem to have spent a lot of time working on it initially. But it’s pretty clear that active development on it has stopped. There are bugs — some critical — that have been in place for a couple of years now. More continue to pile up, literally as I write this. Further, you have complete disconnects between the Inform 7 versions on different operating systems. For example, the Skein and Transcript have gone away entirely in the Mac version, replaced by a Testing panel. A Testing panel that doesn’t fully work and has one divergence that breaks functionality entirely. The downloadable Mac version has had an issue that prevents it from running on newer Mac versions. An app store update version does work, but there are reasons that not everyone will want to use the app store version (overwriting existing other versions, being one of those). This should literally just be the copying of the new binary to the Inform site. But even that, apparently, is too much involvement to be expected. The extension situation is bad and appears to have been bad for quite some time now, going by the history of posts about it. Many of the extensions aren’t accurate, aren’t up-to-date, conflict with other extensions, don’t work with current versions of Inform. Given the multi-year cycle that it takes things to get done, it’s hard to imagine why extensions, at the very least, can’t keep pace. Further, there are three locations now where extensions can be gathered from, one of which is annoyingly difficult to use. Certain interpreters still act inconsistently such that certain design decisions come down to a lot of “either-or” micro-decisions, that are poorly documented. Beyond the maintainers of the IDE portions, the involvement of the Inform 7 development crew — whomever they actually are — has been infinitesimal (at best) or entirely non-existent (at worst) with the wider community. It’s sad to see it happen. But unlike what happened with Curveship (as just one example), let’s not have Inform 7 just fade away completely without the decency of a wake and a proper burial. Yes, that’s melodramatic. I know Inform 7 is still being used by lots of people. But for something that had such promise, I think it’s sad to see no one comment upon what it has become.[/quote] Can you imagine being so rude and entitled? Good grief. [/quote]