[Announce] Glimmr

Hi all,

I’ve finally released Glimmr, a modular system of extensions for doing graphics in I7. I won’t say too much about it here, since I’ve both previewed it and mentioned it a few times over the last few months, but here’s a quick blurb for those who don’t know what it is:

In its simplest form, Glimmr supplies commands for drawing images files (PNG or JPEG), simple primitives (rectangles, boxes, lines), arbitrary bitmap images, and painted text. Through additional extensions, Glimmr also provides a full system for managing display of complex, dynamic compositions in a graphics window. These might include maps that progressively reveal themselves as the player moves through them, card games, etc.

Glimmr also includes the Glimmr Canvas Editor. Include it in an empty project, add some images, and you have a full GUI graphics editor. Lay out your scene visually and press the Source Code button, and a file of Inform 7 source code will be generated. Just paste this code into your project and your composition is reproduced exactly, with only a few lines of code.

You can download Glimmr, including image files for the code examples, a toolkit for map-making, and so on, here:

code.google.com/p/glimmr-i7x/dow … e%20r2.zip

The extensions should also show up individually (and without image files) on the Inform extensions page.

If you’d like to get a quick sense of the sorts of things Glimmr can do without installing the extensions, you can get a hold of compiled versions of the extension examples here. The examples are pretty modest, but hopefully they will be useful.

(I know that some folks are interested in the Glimmr Automap extension. That one will be released sometime in the near future.)

A final note: If you have anything you’d like a tutorial on, drop a note here. I’ve got a little blog set aside for that kind of thing, but I probably won’t do anything in that line unless I know I’ve got at least one interested reader!

Cheers,
Erik

Thanks for all the work you put into creating this. Glimmr is amazing!

I’ve had to hold back on talking it up at the Seattle IF meetings since you hadn’t released any of the example files. :smiley:

I found the roguelike especially interesting since it offers a way to model positioning within a room without a lot of awkward phrasing, and without any radical changes to the standard world model. Also, roguelikes are cool.

Thanks! The roguelike example’s movement is strictly visual–there’s not any real collision checking going on or really any game-state tracking at all–but I think you’re right that the basic method could be developed into something. I hope someone picks up the gauntlet and releases a real project!

(As a side note, the tiles I used are from a tileset called LoFi Roguelike that is freely usable for noncommercial projects.)

–Erik

Wow, that looks pretty cool !

I have tried your compiled demos on ZMPP and put some of them online as a demo, I hope you are fine with that:

zmpp.sourceforge.net/games/index.html

Wei-ju

Very cool, thanks for doing this. I was wondering how Glimmr would perform under ZMPP–it’s better than I expected. (Glimmr is optimized for flexibility and ease of use over performance, though in practice the trade-off seems pretty small. I guess we’ll see a true test when and if someone makes a full-size game with it.)

Congratulations on ZMPP’s very nice handling of the graphic display and mouse input–very impressive!

–Erik

I’ve posted a tutorial on building a dynamic map with the Basic Floorplan Toolkit that ships with Glimmr. You can find it at the Glimmr blog: glimmr.wordpress.com. The tutorial is intended for folks who have read very little (none) of the Glimmr docs, and should be good for anyone hoping to use Glimmr’s GUI graphics editor as a first approach to the system.

–Erik