I have some technical issues/questions now, so before I post them to the apropriate section, I’d just like to get the basics right – I’m not that well acquainted with the various systems and platforms, so please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong:
This would indeed be ideal. The problem is:
- Six is distributed as a Glulx game and therefore requires a Glulx interpreter (such as Glulxe) which (dumb)frotz doesn’t support (it only runs Z-machine files).
- Child’s Play is compiled for Z-machine yet when I tried loading it with the latest Windows version (2.44) of dumbfrotz, it didn’t work (‘Unknown Z-code version when loading…’).
Since I would potentially like to use both Z-machine and Glulx games, I’m not sure what would be the easiest way to support both. I suppose there isn’t any general interpreter. I only need a very simple stdin/stdout interpreter without any GUI. Or could this issue be perhaps solved by recompiling the selected games for only one of the platforms (this would obviously limit me to games with available compilable source which for example Six isn’t if I chose Z-machine)?
For Z-machine, I only found dumbfrotz, which doesn’t seem to work so far (but maybe I’m doing something wrong?).
As for Glulx, there are a lot of different packages and layers that confuse me – I’m not sure if cheapglk is what I’m looking for (it might be). I’m also unsure whether the Windows CLI version mentioned here on the forums of Git is what I’m looking for: ifarchive.org/indexes/if-arc … sXgit.html
To paint the bigger picture, I would like to create an API in Python between IF games (their interpreters, to be precise) on one side and AI controllers (neural networks, …) on the other side.
So what my API would need from the IF interpreter would simply be:
– loading a game file with a specified random seed (this is important)
– writing user input to the game (via stdout)
– reading the game output (doesn’t matter if in a structured-data way or in plain text) (via stdin)
– detecting the state of the game when relevant (score, ending, …) (some signals/flags, I suppose)
So the question is: is there an equivalent of dumbfrotz for Glulx game files? Should this version of dumbfrotz be working with Child’s Play (I would submit a github ticket if I was sure there was a bug but I’m really not :))?