Alan Interactive Fiction Language

Adventure Writing for Everyone

MAJOR FEATURE: the class of parameters and locals can now be asserted using If .. Isa .. allowing general restrictions in parameter restrictions and more specific access (attributes, scripts, containers) with the If-statement
FEATURE: Attributes inherited from entity can now be referenced for literals
FEATURE: Debugger now has a command to toggle a levels of trace off and on
FEATURE: Debugger now lists the programmer name of instances as well as the player name
FEATURE: Debugger can now list instances matching a wildcard pattern ("instance a*")
FEATURE: Compiler now flags all occurrences of a multiply defined identifier
BUGFIX: Out of memory error in interpreter for very large game fixed
BUGFIX: sometimes locating a location At itself crashed the interpreter
BUGFIX: comparing strings with '<>' did not work
BUGFIX: using a location identifier as a direction sometimes caused a compiler crash
BUGFIX: A DEBUG message would be printed in some games in some circumstances

Details: Written by Administrator; Last Updated: 27 December 2013; Hits: 3728

FEATURE: radically improved rules handling to simplify usage which changed the context in which rules execute (Current Location and Current Actor no longer allowed in rules)
FEATURE: "Location Of" expression to retrieve the current location of an instance
FEATURE: syntax may now start with a parameter (an instance, like an actor name)
FEATURE: TRANSCRIPT statement in language
FEATURE: PROMPT section in language to control player input prompt
FEATURE: new debugger command language
FEATURE: tracing can now use symbolic parameter names
BUGFIX: if a dollar sign was followed by a character not defined as a printing symbol, that character was lost
BUGFIX: sometimes events would not be restored correctly from a save file
BUGFIX: positioning of error pointers in -cc mode was not always correct causing AlanIDE to point to the wrong place
BUGFIX: sometimes WinArun and Gargoyle interpreters hung on <more> prompt
BUGFIX: undo after quit did sometimes crash

Beta 1 was never made available to the public.

FEATURE: Improved the tracing messages in the debugger
BUGFIX: WinArun did not follow preferences for window colouring and fonts
BUGFIX: WinArun did not find sound and image resources when started in another directory
BUGFIX: a pronoun referencing an instance from a previous command that is no longer available, the message was non-optimal
Clearified licensing, read COPYING
Upgraded WinGLK to 1.39

FEATURE: Entered is now inherited and nested in an accumulative way.
FEATURE: Entered is now executed before Description.
FEATURE: 'Can' is now added to 'Is', 'Has' and 'Are' for starting attribute declarations.
FEATURE: Instances listed after 'except'/'but' in player input using 'all', are now handled in the same way as other syntax parameters.
BUGFIX: The location of a instance that is 'nowhere' could cause the interpreter to crash.
BUGFIX: The pronoun handling could get confused if the player command referred to multiple instance with the same pronoun.
BUGFIX: An UNDO command directly after a QUIT where the player choose to UNDO crashed.
BUGFIX: The compiler could crash if a reference attribute was not defined in the parent class.
BUGFIX: Aggregating over an attribute might crash the interpreter if the aggregating set contained containers taking instances not having the attribute.
BUGFIX: Entered did not always set This correctly.
BUGFIX: 'except' without preceeding parameters caused the interpreter to crash.
BUGFIX: A problem with literals caused the dial-sample to crash.
BUGFIX: Forward delete now works on MacOSX (and probably Linux too).
BUGFIX: Some cases of disambiguating player references did not work as expected.

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"I think it's the best IF language I've ever seen - and I *am* a programmer."

Andrew Heale

Changes in Alan V3.0beta3