While trying to figure out why one of my Inform games has three different IFID numbers for three publicly-available versions, I realized that using the “Save as” option in Inform generates a different IFID number for the new folder. (This is in Inform 7 6L). Is this supposed to happen?
In the past I’ve sometimes done “Save as” so I can keep the original version of a project intact while working on an update in a separate folder. In my case, since multiple versions are already out there, I guess I should just put all three IFIDs on IFDB, but I’m wondering what to do going forward, or whether this is a bug.
I believe this is intended behavior (since two projects sharing an IFID is a larger problem than two IFIDs for the same project). You can keep it the same by going to your Inform folder and duplicating the .inform and .materials directories by hand rather than going through the IDE.
Ok, thanks. I can see why you’d want to err on the side of creating a new IFID rather than keeping the same one. And in retrospect, I see how the manual could be understood the way you’re saying. All the same, I wonder if this could stand to be clarified in the manual and/or IDE.
The manual says:
(I’d read “new project” to mean “what happens when you click New Project in the IDE”).
In the part that follows, it spells out what happens if you “copy it as a file” (same IFID) and “create a new project” (new IFID), but doesn’t spell out which category “Save As” falls under. I seem to have drawn the wrong conclusion about that.