Welcome to Inform! ****************** Inform is an Interactive Fiction (text adventure) game compiler -- it takes source code you write and turns it into a game data file which is then played using an 'interpreter'. There are several interpreters available which can play Inform games on different machines (e.g. frotz, jzip) -- you can probably obtain one from the same place you got this package. Inform was originally written by Graham Nelson, and you are free to redistribute it under certain conditions -- see the file COPYING for details. What's in this distribution? ============================ The following subdirectories are included in the package: src source code for the Inform program lib Inform library files include selection of useful include files manual the online Designer's Manual, in HTML format demos some Inform demo games (including the classic 'advent') tutor some Inform tutorial files docs internal Inform documentation and release notes contrib other contributed Inform stuff How do I install it? ==================== See the file called INSTALL for detailed instructions. But basically, it boils down to... ./configure make make install This will install the following (assuming default installation): Inform executable in /usr/local/bin Inform library modules in /usr/local/share/inform/VERSION/module Inform include files in /usr/local/share/inform/VERSION/include HTML Designer's Manual in /usr/local/share/inform/manual OK, it's installed. Now what? ============================== Now you want to read the online Designer's Manual. Or, alternatively, you could start with one of the tutorials in the tutor directory. After that, you're all set to write an IF game! Yay! Troubleshooting =============== If you have any problems with anything, contact the relevant person listed in the AUTHORS file. If you're not sure who that is, contact me instead, at the address at the end of this file. The Interactive Fiction archive =============================== There's a good chance that you got this package from the IF archive, or one of its mirrors. But if you didn't, you might like to check it out: http://www.ifarchive.org It has lots of great things: games, hints, solutions, authoring systems (like this one), programs for playing the games, tools for making maps, and stuff about the late, great Infocom. There are also more resources for programming with Inform, including a version of the Inform Designer's Manual suitable for printing. See the stuff in the programming/inform6 subdirectory. The Inform maintainers ====================== An active community of Inform maintainers exists to fix bugs, implement new features and issue new versions of the program. If you'd like to know more, or you think you've found a bug, visit them at: http://www.inform-fiction.org About this package ================== In my tinkerings with Inform over the years (I really *will* write a proper game one day), I've had to move the program, libraries and documentation to several different Unix machines. Although it wasn't a big problem, it was just tedious enough to make me want to automate the configuration and installation process, and have everything I needed automatically to hand. The result is this package, which should build and install on all Unix, Linux and Win32/Cygwin systems. Then I thought, hey, maybe other people find it a bit tedious too. So I asked Graham for his permission to redistribute Inform, and he gave it. Hope it proves useful. Many people contributed to the contents of this package. See the file AUTHORS for more details. Finally... ========== If you have any comments or suggestions (or anything else, for that matter) feel free to drop me a line. I am: Glenn Hutchings .