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The ALAN Network
The ALAN project is spread across a variety of websites, repositories, wikis and services, which constitute the ALAN Network.
This page will present the main nodes of the network, organized according to their target end users.
Table of Contents
If you're new to ALAN, or are just interested in playing adventure games created with ALAN, these are network nodes you be should looking at.
The Alan website is main point of reference for ALAN newcomers, and it's also were you can download the latest ALAN tools for all operating systems.
Newbies will find introductory articles to ALAN, instructions on how to install the ALAN tools on Linux, Mac and Windows, and how to setup a working environment to play or develop ALAN adventures.
The Google group Alan IF discussions is the ALAN mailing list, open to anyone who wishes to join the ALAN community and follow its news and developments.
The list is a place to share news, announce your newly created adventures, ask questions, report bugs, propose new features, as well as chit-chatting to keep the community alive.
The community is fairly small and rather tight-knit, with many of its members having joined a long time ago. Activity on the list varies, oscillating between period of prolonged silence to bursts of activity when there's some major new event in the ALAN ecosystem.
Up to November 2020, the ALAN mailing list used to be hosted at Yahoo!, which shut down its service in December 2020, after decades of free mailing lists hosting. Unfortunately, the old list archives at Yahoo! were deleted and are no longer available for online consulting (we did manage to download a backup of the archive, but since Yahoo! didn't release its specs we haven't yet been able to reconstruct it).
If you're interested in authoring your own text adventures with ALAN, these are network nodes you should be looking at.
At the Alan Docs website you'll find the latest version of all Alan-related documentation, including the ALAN Manual, either for online reading or download.
The AlanIDE is a complete Integrated Development Environment for Alan, specifically designed to write, test and build text adventures in ALAN IF.
It's a cross-platform application, written in Java.
The Alan Standard Library 2, by Anssi Räisänen, is the most advanced library available for ALAN, offering advanced feature for authoring English text adventures.
At the ALAN Internationalization Project you'll find the Foundation Library, a basic library to start authoring your own adventures. The library is available in various languages and it's designed to be easy to customize and extend in order to accommodate the needs of any adventure.
If you're interested in actively contributing to the development or maintenance of the ALAN tools or documentation, these are the network nodes you should be looking at.
The Alan IF Development team is the official ALAN GitHub organization gathering developers and those ALAN projects which are maintained as part of the ALAN IF project.
There's always a lot of work going on, therefore support is much appreciated.
This project is part of the ALAN IF Network. Alan is an Interactive Fiction authoring tool for creating text adventures: www.alanif.se