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