Talk:Writing Interactive Fiction with Inform 7

Makefiles for command line development

I found the built-in editor with Inform7 somewhat frustrating, so I wrote a set of Makefile rules to allow me to do command line compiling while I edited the source files in my editor of choice. The build process is quite odd; first the Inform7 front-end generates I6 code from the .ni file, which is then compiled into z8 files. For test playing I used frotz.

#!/usr/bin/make

# For OSX; for Linux i386 it is somewhere in /usr/local/bin
INFORM_PATH=/Applications/Inform.app/Contents/Resources/

I7_BIN=$(INFORM_PATH)/Compilers/ni
I7_LIB=$(INFORM_PATH)/Inform7/Extensions

I6_BIN=$(INFORM_PATH)/Compilers/inform-6.31-biplatform
I6_LIB=$(INFORM_PATH)/Library/Natural

ZCODE_VERSION=8
EXT=z$(ZCODE_VERSION)

ifdef DEBUG
DEBUG_OPTS=D
endif

#
# The arguments to the Inform6 compiler set:
#       -E2SDwv$(ZCODE_VERSION)x \
# E2    Macintosh MPW-style error messages
# S     Strict error-checking at runtime
# w     Disable warning messages
# v8    Generate z-code version 8
# x     Print # for every 100 lines compiled
#
# Optionally, if debugging is requested:
#
# D     Insert "Constant DEBUG;" automatically
#
%.$(EXT): %.ni
        TMPDIR=/tmp/inform7-$$$$
        mkdir -p "$$TMPDIR"/{Build,Source,Index}
        cp "$<" "$$TMPDIR"/Source/story.ni

        "$(I7_BIN)" \
                --rules "$(I7_LIB)" \
                --extension=$(EXT) \
                --package "$$TMPDIR" \

        "$(I6_BIN)" \
                -E2Swv$(ZCODE_VERSION)$(DEBUG_OPTS)x \
                +"$(I6_LIB)" \
                "$$TMPDIR/Build/auto.inf" \
                -o "$@" \

--- Hudson 19:59, 14 December 2008 (UTC)