Could anyone provide me with a piece of code so as to “hide” hyperlinks whithin normal text? (not to appear blue and underlined).
Thank You!
I.B.
Restyling of hyperlinks is currently possible only in the online interpreters (Parchment & Quixe), where you can change pretty much any styling by writing your own CSS rules. Otherwise, interpreters have control over the display of hyperlinks and don’t offer any way for the author of the game to customize.
Oh… I thought there was some kind of code, much like the one you can use to “lock” the text and background colour for any interpreter.
Thanks, anyway!
I.B.
I certainly don’t want to get all up in your business (especially as you seem to be new here; welcome to the forum!), so don’t answer this if you don’t want to talk about it, but I’m very curious as to why you’d even want to do that. My first reaction is that hiding the hyperlinks would make interaction very hunt-the-pixel-ish, as the player would just sort of hover over each word in turn to see if they get the link cursor or not. But maybe you’re hyperlinking almost every word, and it would just be a mass of blue and underlines if you let the links look like that. Or maybe you have some other intended interaction entirely. As I said, I’m curious.
Nice to meet you!
Yeap, I’m new here, although I was somewhat regular in the now-seemingly-defunct r.a.i.f.
My purpose is to make a point-and-click text adventure. Using I7 is quite useful, but I don’t want important things in my prose to stand out very much. I want subtlety.
Imagine a point-and-click graphical adventure, where all the “clickable” items stand out like neon light. That’s how regular hyperlinks are like and I don’t want that.
I’m not completely up to date with graphical adventures, but my impression is that they are moving towards exactly that. The point of adventures should not be “find the hotspot” but something completely else. If hyperlinks in text are hidden, I’d imagine the players (at least I) would spend their time clicking on every word to make sure they don’t miss out on anything instead of actually playing the game.
Of course careful game design could make a system with hidden links work, but it would require serious effort and playtesting.
And yet (to play devil’s advocate) isn’t this more or less the same input model as standard, non-clickable IF? You get a paragraph of text, assume that some of the words mentioned are part of the model world, and try to >EXAMINE the likely-seeming ones to find out which actually are. If anything, guessing by clicking should be a lot faster, right?
Clicking invokes at least the possibility of spamming the paragraph, whereas typing “examine” has a great deal of friction.
But I think that’s a lesser change than the distinction between probing-by-clicking and probing-by-reading. I suspect that when the player leaves the reading modality, the whole idea of having a text game loses a big chunk of its point.
(Whereas in a graphical adventure, you are scanning visually. No modality switch. Probing by mouse (or touchscreen) is as close as we’ve got to probe-by-look-more-closely, at least until eyeball-trackers go mainstream.)
That’s a good point and I don’t actually know whether hidden hyperlinks would lead to same as hunt-the-pixel in graphical adventures. It would probably not if there’s still an option to type in the commands. Still, the most frustrating part of graphical adventures is when you get stuck on a puzzle only because you haven’t found the exact right spot to click on.
In any case if you’re hiding the hyperlinks only to make them harder to find, I do believe it’s not a good design decision.
First of all, I’m deeply honored by your involvement in my authoring problem…
Now…
I have to admit that I’m scared by the parser… the players can type whatever they want and you have to predict it… or the author might have in mind a specificverb (or noun) and the player cannot find it…
I respect to no ends authors that make parsers that can understand everything… I just don’t have the patience to do it…
That’s why I try to make menu or point-and-click adventures. I once turned to SUDS (http://www.sudslore.org/), but it didn’t have the community (or platform) support that a newbie like me needed. I guess that if I knew how to draw I’d be using AGS (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/)…
Thankfully, I7 is very capable and popular… and with the use of hyperlinks I think I can do a PnC Text Adventure.
I don’t want to send my reader pixel-hunting, I also don’t want to to have my prose full of blue underlined words. I may be able to do something like Emily Short’s Jade (http://emshort.wordpress.com/2010/06/07/so-do-we-need-this-parser-thing-anyway/, click on here), but without typing (or the bold words)…
Thank you!
I.B.
Quest supports hyperlinks, and lets you attach verbs to an object so that for example clicking “lamp” might give you a list with verbs such as “look at”, “take” and “switch on”.
You can customise the hyperlink colour, and choose to turn off underlining, so if you make the link colour the same as the normal text colour, the hyperlink will be render the same as normal text.
Quest is at textadventures.co.uk/quest/
Have you considered a keyword-based system like Blue Lacuna? It still uses a text-parser, but also bolds some of the words in each paragraph. You can type just one of those words and the game will invent a reasonable action for you. The down side is that you still need to provide a decent parser, but it doesn’t need to be “perfect” anymore since your keywords make guess-the-verb/noun impossible (or at least much less probable).
Not necessarily. Some IF makes a point of calling out things that can be interacted with. The oldest examples tend to accomplish this by printing the names of interactive objects in ALL-CAPS, owing to the fact that the availability of typographic control couldn’t safely be assumed (and this convention is still adhered to in titles that are going for that “retro” look), while more recent examples tend to use typography or text colour to the same effect.
I didn’t know that Quest was that flexible! I think I’ll give it a check! (Although I have to admit that I7 already feels like home and all my programming is formed in my head in I7 code… 
)
What I don’t like in the Keyword system like Blue Lacuna’s is that (if I’m not mistaken) the different keywords with their different colours stand out too much in the prose for my liking… I’d rather use hyperlinks, they’re more uniform…
Most people on this forum don’t 