6G60 - Building of Index causes Inform 7 to crash

Hi, I’m a dev and I’ve been working with Inform 7 for several years. In fact I may have made the largest Inform 7 game in existence, it currently stands at 928959 words long source text, not including extensions. I won’t include many details about it because of its extremely explicit nature but I’m sure with any amount of Google-Fu and my username you could find it.

Recently (today), Inform 7 has started to crash after compiling. It’s doing this across all my PCs (but they are all Windows 10).

After crashing, the program then crashes every time I try to open that project again until I delete the Index folder inside the project folder. After I delete that folder, it opens normally.

If I remove any reasonable amount of code, it compiles successfully, which suggests I’m reaching some kind of complexity limit.

What’s key to note here is that it crashes after it finishes compiling, right after it jumps from the “Progress” tab in Errors to “Problems”. I believe for these reasons that it is crashing when trying to build the Index tab, which I believe is completely unnecessary to the actually working of the game.

My question is: does anyone have any idea if I can tell Inform 7 to not bother building the Index, that I don’t care about it? For example if it’s open source, maybe I could build a custom version of the application which doesn’t build the index? Or is there a way I can compile the source code outside of the Inform 7 application? e.g. by the command line? I tried using the command that Inform 7 spits out when you compile in-game, but it complains that the extensions are for Glulx only.

I can’t migrate to later versions of Inform 7 because of dependencies on extensions for drawing images.

Any advice or suggestions on how to continue my investigation would be greatly appreciated!

Kerkerkruip’s build script might be useful to you.

Hmm interesting, looks like it’s an executable for Unix?

I will look into that actually, since I have only tried things on Windows.

EDIT: wow, lookingat this Kerkerkruip stuff, it looks like I’m not making the largest I7 game at all!

I7 is not open source (yet) and you cannot tell it to skip generating the index. As far as I know.

There were definitely some 6G60 bugs that caused the compiler to crash on very large games. Possibly you’re running into inform7.com/mantis/view.php?id=826 ? In which case a command-line build tool would help, since it’s the IDE that’s crashing.

Thanks a lot, it looks like I might be running into exactly that. At least if I know that it’s the images that are causing issues, I can be aware of what I need to work around. I can make some sacrifices by shrinking or removing images anyway. And I am aware there are ways to change the images packaged with an existing blorb file anyway, so if really necessary I can inject the large images into the package after release.

I’ll do some more testing to see if this is indeed the problem!