Latest News about Alan!
I was very happy to see that there are still games produced with Alan. One of the most productive Alan-authors, Anssi Räisänen, have produce another work of Interactive Fiction using Alan, "Temptation in the Village", and entered it in the annual IFComp.
The "game" is an adaptation of an unfinished work of the author Franz Kafka. Read all about the game and the IFcomp 2025.
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Alan v3.0 beta8 is now available. You can view the details of the changes in the Changes Section. You are encouraged to update to this latest release.
The major change is extended support for various national characters by adding support for UTF-8 (a character encoding scheme). It supplements the current ISO8859-1 that Alan hitherto has supported. Support for ISO8859-1 is getting less and less main stream so it was time to do something about this.
If your files (Alan source, solution files) have a UTF-8 BOM they will automatically be considered to use UTF-8, otherwise you need to give explicit options to the compiler and interpreter to have this functionality.
FUTURE: In the next beta release all files will by default be considered in UTF-8 encoding, unless you use special options. So beta8 is the first step in migrating Alan into UTF-8.
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Alan is continuosly built using a so called Continuous Integration (CI) job. Whenever there is a change in the source code repo on Github a job is run to compile and package various packages, the Development Snapshots, or alpha stream.
The machine that hosts that job had a sudden breakdown in February 2021, and it has not been rebuilt yet. That means that for the time being there will be no new alpha versions built.
Furthermore the last couple of development snapshots seem to have gone bad rendering them unusable if you don't have Cygwin (Linux emulation layer for windows) installed.
We apologize and will give updates as soon as that the CI chain is up and running again.
Update
The AlanIF continuous integration pipeline has now been up and running for a while. That means that new development snapshots are uploaded automatically as soon as they pass all tests. You can find them here.
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Alan v3.0 beta7 is now available. You can view the details of the changes in the Changes Section. You are encouraged to update to this latest release.
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Alan is an open source project and for many years source has been available, during the last decade on Bitbucket. For various reasons GitHub has become a more and more apropriate site for hosting open source projects. There has also been some activity there to consolidate some Alan related project into an organization not surprisingly called alan-if, primarily thanks to Tristano Ajmone. One of the most important is the alan-docs project, where you can find many of the Alan documentation projects. So Alan has moved there too.
I hope this will make Alan even more visible, and make it easier to cooperate on improving the Alan system.
(The old repo on Bitbucket, will still exist, but only rarely be brought up to date.)
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