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Welcome to the Alan Adventure Language wiki!

About ALAN

ALAN is a language and set of cross-platform tools for authoring and playing Interactive Fiction games (aka text adventures). The Alan SDK (Software Development Kit) is free and open source, released under Artistic License 2.0.

The philosophy behind the Alan language is to provide an IF-authoring tool which is simple to use and flexible. Although it is a programming language, its syntax is closer to prose than to classical programming languages, and anyone can quickly learn to create adventures in Alan, without needing programming experience.

Unlike other IF authoring tools, Alan doesn't ship with a built-in library; instead, it provides all the basic tools to build your own adventure world according to your needs, from the ground up. It's entirely up to the author who decides which verbs/commands to include in his/her game, and which kind of objects and actors should populate it.

Likewise, Alan doesn't impose any spoken language either. Although there are built-in presets to simplify creating adventures in English, German and Swedish, authors are by no means limited to those languages, and can build an adventure in any language that uses the roman alphabet. As a matter of fact, Alan is probably the easiest IF authoring tool to work with for western languages other than English.

About This Wiki

The ALAN Wiki is dedicated to documenting the ALAN compiler and interpreter, and provide information about ALAN technical specifications, and the AMachine (the "virtual machine" in which Alan storyfiles are executed).

This Wiki is not about learning to create adventures with Alan — there are other projects for that purpose, like the Alan Docs and Alan by Examples repositories.

In the collaborative spirit of the ALAN-IF community, this Wiki is open to anyone's contributions; so feel free to edit the existing contents and add new pages. All contents submitted to this Wiki are released into the public domain via the CC0 1.0 Universal dedication.

For more info, see the Contributing and License pages.

If you have any questions, please open an issue or contact the Alan community via email on the [Alan Yahoo Group].

Useful External Links

• www.AlanIF.se — the Alan website.
• Alan Google Group — for community help, announcements and discussions.
• Alan source code — Alan source code repository on GitHub.
• Alan IF Development team — GitHub profile and public projects.
• Alan Features Wish-list — at ALAN Discussions.

Documentation and Tutorials

• Alan Docs — source repository of the Alan documentation (AsciiDoc) on GitHub.
• Alan Docs website — official Alan documentation website, where you can read and download various documents:
  • The Alan Manual — on-line version of the latest ALAN Adventure Language Reference Manual.
  • Alan Cookbook v2 — by Anssi Räisänen.
  • The Alan Beginner's Guide — by Michael Arnaud (2006). Tutorial source files available.
  • Alan IDE Reference Guide — by Robert DeFord (2018).
  • Alan Conversion Guide from v2 to v3 — by Thomas Nilefalk.

Code Examples

• Alan by Examples — community driven collection of examples to learn Alan.
• Samples & examples for Alan v3 — on Alan website.

Libraries

• Alan Standard Library 2 (2016–) — by Anssi Räisänen, GitHub repository.
• Alan Standard Library 1 (2010–2011) — by Anssi Räisänen, at Alan Goodies, for compiling legacy Alan3 adventures.
• Alan Library v0.6.2 (2001–2007) — an earlier (but still working) library, for compiling legacy Alan3 adventures.
• Alan Italian — Italian port of the Alan StdLib, by Tristano Ajmone.
• Alan Spanish — the pALANte library, by Bruce Humphrey and Marcos Donnantuoni.

Internationalization

• Alan i18n — GitHub repository.

The goal of the ALAN Internationalization Project is to provide multi-language translations of a basic ALAN IF library to begin creating text adventures in different languages, and provide reference implementations to add support for new locales.

Editors

• AlanIDE — a complete Alan Integrated Development Environment, built in Java/Eclipse by Alan developer Thomas Nilefalk. For more info, see:
  • AlanIDE info page.
  • Alan IDE Reference Guide — by Robert DeFord (2018), PDF document.
  • AlanIDE sources — JAVA source files, on GitHub.
• Sublime Alan IF — Alan 3 package for Sublime Text 4 (usable Alpha).

Miscellanea

• Alan Goodies — a collection of assorted assets for Alan.
• Alan Repository Template — A boilerplate for quickly creating Alan repositories with the right settings.
• Alan Bugs Testbed — collaborative project to report and test Alan bugs.