AIF Toolkit v0.7.0

!!IMPORTANT NOTE!!

Just a warning, there is a fairly good reason NOT to upgrade to the newest version of Inform 7 and AIF Toolkit 0.7.0. Several critical features of the AIF Toolkit have been temporarily withdrawn, anticipating the release of some third party extensions. Those are:

• The entire Adult CYOA extension (pending me fixing bugs).
• The improved disambiguation tools (pending a release of the new Disambiguation Control extension).
• The ability to flash body parts (pending a release of Ignored Rules).

Some basic tests have been done, but I can't say with full certainty there are no bugs or oversights. Please report bugs to me at anotherwannabe93 AT gmail DOT com.

Compatibility with prior versions is broken. Specifically, the AIF Toolkit has removed the use the AIF message rulebooks and so you should use the default "response" system now. Unfortunately, I accidentally deleted the index of responses, so you need to go into the IDE index to see all of the default messages. However, the AIF Toolkit now takes full advantage of perspective and tense shifts, which is definitely awesome.

Download it here.

The Exciting News About I7

What piece of news caused me to literally choke on a biscuit this afternoon?

Why the release of a new version of Inform 7, of course!



Actually, the new version has been out for a little while (six days to be exact) but I've been so consumed with other things that I didn't notice. In case you didn't know, this release of Inform 7 took something like three years to develop, and geeks like me have been checking the I7 site religiously to see if their beloved language has finally released a new version.

I'm very excited to work with the new I7 language. I'm going to have to conjure a new release of the AIF Toolkit to take advantage of I7's delicious, delicious features. Then I'll be working on my Minicomp entry for this year.

So, if you are an author, what can you expect from the new features?

The most important feature for the AIF community is the inclusion of perspective and tense. This was always a weakness of I7 and forced authors to use awkward, unwieldy extensions. No more. Now you can write stories like this:

>GO NORTH
Tom walks north.

>FUCK SANDRA
Tom fucks Sandra.

>POSSESS SANDRA
You become Sandra.

Of course, that's a fairly shitty game, but you get the idea.

The other big weakness of I7 was how library messages are handled. If you use the AIF Toolkit, you'll notice I've built my own way of handling customizable messages since, by default, I7 does a pretty bad job of that. Now customizing default messages are easy and breezy.

There's a lot of other cool technical stuff, such the streamlining of some pretty complex systems. Indexed texts are gone. Real numbers are in. Mountains of bugs are crushed and scattered like dry leaves in autumn.

OK, I'm excited. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to waste an afternoon playing with my new toy.

Fencing Academy

How's it going everyone?

So, I wanted to let people know that I'm working on a series of short stories called "Fencing Academy". The first two parts are here and here. They were, to my pleasure, well received. I'll start posting the stories in full on this blog before they hit Literotica, so this is the place to check if you're checking for updates.

As you might suspect, this was supposed to be the big AIF game I was working on. Unfortunately, for many reasons it just didn't work. While there were but two girls, the plot was, in essence, too grand. Naively I thought reducing the number of girls to two meant "small game". It didn't.

I've been kind of disconnected from the AIF community as of late and I want to say there are still projects in the pipeline that are AIF-related, so I'm not going away. In the short term, it looks like a lot was released on the AIF front and so you can expect a few reviews in the future. Typically, I try not to read ExLibris's reviews before I have a chance to play the games, so look forward to that.