ALAN ADVENTURE LANGUAGE Release 2.8 now available Date: 1999-11-14 THE NEWS IN SHORT: o The previously available mail delivery service has been discontinued. Registration is now personally with thomas.nilsson@progindus.se o Version 2.8 is out. o Alan Home Pages has moved to http://welcome.to/alan-if THE LONG STORY: The Alan System is one of the most easy-to-use tools to create interactive fiction, aka. adventure games. The Alan System is based on a special purpose computer language designed to be used by people more interested in authoring and designing games than for computer programmers. The system consists of a compiler which compiles Alan source to a compact and portable form and an interpreter that interprets such a form to allow playing of the game. Version 2.8 is an upgrade with some new features and bug fixes (see the file Changes and the documentation for details) The format of game files have changed slightly between 2.7 and 2.8. The 2.8 interpreter should run 2.7 compiled games. Older interpreters are available for various platforms. The Alan System is register-ware. To use Alan all you need to do is to register. Registration can be done with a simple email to Thomas Nilsson (thomas.nilsson@progindus.se) with a message *body* containing the single word REGISTER. Complete distribution and documentation packages, as well as other related information, are available from the Alan Home Pages at http://welcome.to/alan-if or ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/programming/alan and its mirrors. The distributions package contains some small examples as well as the compiler and interpreter. The documentation is separately available as text, html or PostScript. For complete copying conditions refer to the file COPYING in the distribution or appendix J in the manual. If you have any problems don't hesitate to contact the authors at the following email addresses: thomas.nilsson@progindus.se gorfo@ida.liu.se All communication is welcome! You may also wish to visit the Alan Home Pages at http://welcome.to/alan-if If you haven't already, join the 1133 people registered. Happy Authoring! The ThoNi & GorFo Adventure Factories