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://inform7.com

About this package

This package was originally created by Glenn Hutchings to address the tedium of gathering the program, libraries, and documentation for several different Unix machines. It received blessing from Graham Nelson. The result is a package that automates the configuration and installation process. It should build and install on all Unix, Linux, and Win32/Cygwin system.

This package is an ideal base for creating pre-compiled packages in the style of Debian .debs, Redhat .rpms and similar schemes as well as build trees like FreeBSD ports, NetBSD pkgsrc, and Gentoo portage.

Many people contributed to the contents of this package. See the file AUTHORS for more details.

This package is hosted at Github: https://github.com/DavidGriffith/inform6unix

Feel free to hack on it and send me improvements!

Finally...

If you have any comments or suggestions (or anything else, for that matter) feel free to drop me a line. I am David Griffith <dave@661.org>.