You're reading a set of answers to Frequently Asked Questions about the Inform 6 programming language,
intended especially to help those who are novices in this arena.
Unless you are planning to write a piece of Interactive Fiction -- a text adventure game -- using Inform,
you might as well go right to the Ifaq
for more general assistance.
Note that the questions here are all about Inform 6.
There is almost nothing in these pages about Inform 7 -- Graham's radical new approach to IF authorship.
This FAQ aims to address topics which commonly cause confusion among newcomers.
However, you shouldn't set your expectations too high; it isn't an Inform tutorial,
it pre-supposes that you've got a copy of the Inform Designer's Manual
and it assumes at least a little knowledge of computer programming.
Very rarely will these answers give you the full story.
Generally, they're designed as introductory tasters, providing just enough information
to illustrate the general principles, and to point you towards the appropriate
material in the definitive Designer's Manual.
In addition to the online format, the FAQ can be downloaded
as a 1Mb zipped PDF document;
I'm deeply grateful to Sonja Kesserich for making this possible,
and for her invaluable collaborative enthusiasm in the whole enterprise.
Many people helped in the creation of this document, sometimes unwittingly;
my thanks for all of the assistance.
The Inform FAQ is copyright of and maintained by Roger Firth,
who is always pleased to receive your comments and contributions.
First posted in July 2001 and last updated: 24 May 2006.
There are other good sources: make sure that you know about the Inform Beginner's Guide
(available, like the Designer's Manual, from the
Inform website), and about these more general FAQ pages:
- The Ifaq gives a very brief overview:
Interactive Fiction (IF) from ten thousand feet;
- The ifwiki FAQ covers much the same ground,
but in greater depth;
- The FAQ for the
rec.arts.int-fiction
(RAIF) Usenet newsgroup covers the authorship of IF in many systems, not just Inform.
Also, these excellent Q&A sites may resolve your more detailed or sophisticated Inform concerns:
Finally, there's a very old Inform FAQ
which relates to Inform 5 and DM2. None of the downloads work
and some of the information is unreliable, life having moved on since 1995; tread carefully here.
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