ALAN 3

File Format
Name	ALAN 3
Ontology	Electronic File Formats Interactive Fiction ALAN 3
Extension(s)	.alan, .a3c
Released	2002

ALAN 3 is an interactive fiction system first created as a successor to ALAN 2 around 2002, and officially replacing ALAN 2 in 2005. As with most interactive fiction systems, it uses two formats: a "source" format, which is human-readable and -editable, and a "compiled" format which is run by an interpreter.

ALAN 3 can by run with Gargoyle using a plugin distributed from the ALAN 3 website.

Extensions

Source files use the extension .alan, as did with ALAN 2. Compiled files use the extension .a3c. Unlike ALAN 2, which is a multi-file format, ALAN 3 games have no accompanying .dat file.

Identification

.alan files have no magic number, but they probably contain the ASCII strings "verb", "isa", "does", "the", "end verb", and "exit", with varying capitalization.

a3d files start with the ASCII magic number ALAN.

Software

• The ALAN 3 website's downloads section
• The ALAN 3 source code on BitBucket
• Source code to an early (3.0 alpha 7, 2010) release
• The IF Archive "programming" section on ALAN 3

Sample Files

• A mix of ALAN 2 and ALAN 3 games in the IF Archive. Mostly .a3c.
• .alan files showing use of the standard library

Links

• The Interactive Fiction Wiki entry on "Alan" (originally describing ALAN 2 but partially updated for ALAN 3 when it was released)
• The ALAN 3 reference manual