Marnie Parker has released more information about the 2007 IF Art Show, her competition for works of IF that are more art object than game. If you're going to enter, you must submit your entry by May 18th. No word yet on who will be on the competition's jury.
David Fisher is running InnovationComp.
This was originally going to be the Things You Can't Quite Do Yet Using Current IF Systems Comp (TYCQDYUCIFSComp), but that seemed a bit long. The basic idea is to describe something that could potentially be done in IF, but requires a foundation that does not exist in current IF systems to do fully / properly.
You should write your entry as a transcript with footnotes describing what the underlying IF system is doing. Here's an example:
Forest Clearing
You find yourself in another [1] small clearing, surrounded by stout looking oak trees.
>break off a branch [2]
...
Footnotes
[1] The parser is aware of the number of similar locations that have been visited, and inserts "another" etc. in the description as appropriate (see Dynamic Text Generation for details). The player can also use words like "other" to refer to things, eg. "go back to the other clearing".
[2] There is no explicit "branch" object here, but the parser's world model tells it that branches are parts of trees (and can be broken off). The world model also just says there are "trees" here, but after a branch is broken off, a new tree object (with a broken branch) is created and placed in this location.
Email your entry to David Fisher by April 30th, 2007.
Bas2Inf is a Basic-to-Inform-6 compiler, to help porting old games to the much more modern z-machine. The compiler is written using Ruby, and supports the Commodore 64 Basic V2 and DecBasic. If you'd like to see an example of its results, take a look at Sunburst Contamination, a game ported using the tool.