More on Interpreters
At the time of this writing, Bisquixe does not scale images to a window. I can personally confirm that Gargoyle, Windows Glulxe, and Quixe/Lectrote all do. It is on the radar for Parchment/iplayIF. [if you are a Spatterlight user and can comment on this, please PM me and I’ll update this post]. These interpreters are likely the five Glulx interpreters with the largest footprint, but there are many more out there.
The Glk specification was updated last year to include image scaling. It is reasonable to assume that your game’s graphics will work many places—web, GBLORB, or otherwise—but they assuredly won’t work everywhere. An interpreter that is no longer maintained, for instance, will not be compliant with the latest Glk spec.
This is not a criticism of any platform or platform developer. All of these technologies are labors of love performed by people in their free time; they are gifts. However, we authors do need to understand that, should we release a GBLORB story file, we cannot guarantee what that game’s experience will be like.
If we release a standalone story file with images, we have two options. We can accept that some players will experience our wide images as being clipped off at the right edge of the game window. We can otherwise include small images that will hopefully fit on any (non-mobile) screen.
Similarly, we may compose music for our games. Not all interpreters will play it. Bisquixe does not support cross-fades, but Parchment does. And so forth.
An advantage of releasing a web-playable game is that we can guarantee through testing the behavior of a single, chosen interpreter, whether that be Parchment, Quixe, or Bisquixe. Taking the plunge into audiovisually rich Inform games carries with it added complexity and risk.
While this sounds darker than I intend, it is generally true that reviewers review games rather than interpreters. The more authors diverge from a plain-text only design, the more possible it is that they might receive feedback regarding an interpreter’s handling of small play windows, for instance. This is not a critique of players, of course, but we authors should be clear-eyed about the very complex reception context of parser games.
Even though not all web interpreters scale images at this time, we have options for adding such support ourselves. This will be discussed in a later post.