Is there a maximum rules limit in Inform 6?

Question

I have a very large inform 7 project (378k words & 4 years in the making), the support for developing which I use to live off! And I have today hit a huge huge block - I can't make any more rules. Whenever I try to make a new rule, regardless of how simple or complex the rule is, regardless of whether is it's a "To" rule, a "To say" rule, or four or more "This is the bla bla bla rule"s, Inform 7 successfully compiles, telling me that the code is fine, but then it comes up with an error: "Translating the Source - Failed
The application ran your source text through the Inform 7 compiler, as usual, and it found no problems translating the source. Something must have gone wrong all the same, because the second stage of the process - using the Inform 6 compiler to turn this translated source into a viable story file - turned up errors. This should not happen. The errors are written out on the Progress tab, but will only make sense to experienced Inform 6 users (if even to them)."

The error is simply "C:\Program Files (x86)\Inform 7\Compilers\inform-632 \
-kwSDG +include_path=..\Source,.\ auto.inf output.ulx
Compiler finished with code 10"

How do I know the issue is specifically rules?

If I comment out a rule in my code, it will let me add one or more rules before this appears.

The complexity and size of the rule seems to have some impact, but the number of rules seems to be the biggest limiting factor.

I have tried this on 3 different machines, with different specifications and running different OSs: Windows 7 and 8 and 10 and the result is always the same, so the computer is not to blame.

NB. I am using 6G60 because the latest version broke several extensions that my game relies on. So if the latest version does fix this issue, then please let me know and I guess I can work hard to resolve the migration issues, but it looks to me like a hard limit of i6?

Anyway, this is awful awful news for me since I rely on this game's development to support living at the moment. Any answers, advice or other inputs people have as to how best I should try and resolve this issue, please do reply!!!

Answer 1

I have managed to solve my own issue, at least for now!

After 24 hours of hard work fixing issues with my source code and various extensions to make it compatible with 6L38 (I had to just discard Glimmr entirely and comment out the relevant code as it was much too complicated for me to fix), I tried to compile the code in 6L38 and was told that my "MAX_ARRAYS" value was too low. Modifying this made the game successfully compile in 6L38 (albeit without images thanks to losing Glimmr).

I then decided to try this "Use MAX_ARRAYS" line in my 6G60 version and lo and behold it compiled fine!

This is quite bizarre as in the past, the 6G60 compiler has successfully told me which of these values (e.g. MAXOBJECTS, MAXCLASSES) needed changing, but this time it just died with code 10. But the new compiler was able to tell me what the issue was.

In conclusion, thank the stars for the 6L38 compiler! If it wasn't for that, I probably wouldn't be able to make any more progress on the game at all and would have no idea how to remedy the situation.

Comments

You should report this at http://inform7.com/mantis/

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It's probably not useful to report 6G60 bugs if the issue seems to be fixed in the latest version, unless it turns out that the underlying bug is still there.