Having spent most of spring working on other projects, including writing my own stories and taking a deeper look at TADS with it’s existing libraries, I’ve come to a few conclusions: Trying to decipher TADS-code (which has a design focus of less typing for the author) has made me appreciate the natural language of I7 even more; my understanding of I7 has improved quite a bit since I started; layered clothing really needs something to tie garments and body parts together, besides just layering.

As a consequence of all of this, I set out to remake the bodypart/clothing part of the framework. No small task, considering body parts are the foundation that the entire framework was built upon, and before I knew it I was looking at rewriting the entire framework. Which probably was a good thing too; looking through old code can be quite painful, and much of it was worse than I had expected (including leaving the entire work of access to body parts to the story author). As a result, I reused ideas instead of code when writing the new version. The new code is available on GitHub, but there’s still testing and features needed before a full release.

One of the largest changes is that “everything” now comes in the same extension, instead of being divided in modules. The main reason for the old modular approach, was that it supported two incompatible clothing systems, while in the remake they can coexist. Further, the only functionality that works out of the box is actions, but even those don’t actually do anything unless the author has declared which items are eligible for the actions. Therefore I feel confident that it’s safe to bundle everything together, which makes it easier to integrate properly. With the modular approach, things could fail if the modules were included in the wrong order.

At least now you know that the project (and me personally) aren’t dead yet!