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Start of Chapter 25: Releasing |
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Inform 7 Home Page / Documentation
§25.15. Republishing existing works of IF
Some long-time users of Inform will have projects which were originally made using the very different Inform 6 language. Story files produced with Inform 6 do not have any of the extra touches in this chapter: in particular, they have no cover art and no bibliographic data, which makes them rather plain and anonymous to newer Treaty of Babel-equipped programs like Zoom, Spatterlight or Windows Frotz.
To help with this, today's Inform can republish an Inform 6 project by combining an Inform 7 source text which contains only release instructions and bibliographic data with an already-compiled Inform 6 story file. We do this by writing a short source text which contains:
We then place the story file in the ".materials" folder. By default this will be called "Story.z8", but we can alternatively name it:
Release along with an existing story file called "Zork1_sg.z5".
The Settings panel must be switched to the Z-machine for this to work, since only Z-machine story files are supported this way, not Glulx. And we can now use the Release button to obtain the goods.
An existing story file can take advantage of all of the extra features - cover art, titling, website, feelies and so forth - earlier in this chapter, but not those - walkthrough, source text, map - which are still to come.
The following is a typical example of a source text used solely to bind up an old Inform 6-compiled story file:
The story description is "It's become a matter of pride now not to give up. That tourist map of Paris must be up here somewhere in all this clutter, even if it has been five years since your last trip. And it's your own fault. It looks as if your great-grandfather was the last person to tidy up these lofts..."